Ode To This Autumn Day

Everything is on fire. It crunches and scatters and spreads over everything. I walk on it, and it is good. It smells of ending life, and it covers me until I am swallowed.

It leaves nothing but vein-prints on the sidewalk.

The smoke and ashes are above me today, breathing cool autumn breath down my back. I want it to be my home. It reminds me of England.

I am pressing a flame beneath my Art Through the Ages. I do not want it to fade, but all burning things turn black eventually. It fights me: it wants to curl up and die. I will not let it.

If I am on fire, does it mean that I am burning? Will I find ashes before my eyes, will my toes start to shrivel and whither, dark and curling? If I am on fire, am I dying?

No. I am being pressed beneath art through the ages. I am being pressed by the infant art inside of me. It wants to keep me forever, to look upon me and leave my vein-prints on the sidewalk. It wants to walk upon me and think, this is good. It wants to immortalize my scars and weaknesses because they are me as much as it is.

Still, I am fleeting. I will break and die, and ten thousand more will swarm to cover my place on the barren ground. I will be forgotten.

My only hope is that art will press me between vanilla pages and let me stain them, and that someone will pick up my book and open it and find me there, dead but alive. A history, a journal, a single flame between a single pair of pages opened by a single pair of hands and read by a single pair of eyes. That will be enough for me.