Click.
Spark.
Light
The dark.
Just keep the flame from engraving its mark.
The viscous amber, the salty indigo
Are able enough to crawl up your arms.
They can feast on your festering flesh
And move as a pack of hungering harm.
But for now, you have caged the beasts
In a plastic pocket of potential,
And you raise their tamed torrents
To the chemicals poised between your parted lips.
Yes, your shaking fingertips
Will instead embrace danger in the form of stumbling smoke—
To inhale rebellion and ecstasy
In a world that defines ecstasy
As waking to the stomach-turning screams of an alarm,
Conforming to the wants of a green-backed power
That is not a god
That barely satisfies the surface of a craving
For belonging,
For being,
For giving…
That displaces the hopes of the millions of the “rest”
For the survival of the “best,”
And falling asleep knowing that you are as enslaved
As the fire you have contained
And sold for a dollar and some change.

But in the crevices of your memories
And secondary school textbooks,
You have proven that some change can in fact be afforded.
For like the rusty coins you ache and bleed for
And like the true gods you aspire to be,
Fire reveals its infinite faces
And exchanges its hangman’s hood
For a crown dipped in copper love.
You have been taught not to play with our burning form,
Yet we are the only hope of keeping you warm.