death & its blooming.

you know when fire souls collide? how they smolder & their burn makes you believe fairytales really are forever? how their smoke is more pure than any of smoke stack & you loved to breath it?

when their smolders turn embers & embers turn ash & there's no phoenix left to rise, where does that love go? i think it's dead in the charcoal dust, even though it's the antonym to any bedtime story. i think it festers in the souls & is etched like a nightmare they can't forget; how did something so velvet become so brash?

he said that souls forget that clock stops for no one & each tick strikes both soul & within minutes they won't recognize the other. that's why when the fire souls try to make man fire by match, it sputters & chokes. their burn will never be the same, & they suffer for it.

but it doesn't have to be that way. they can remember the old fire burn & the beauty reds & orange & whiteish-blues.

the trick, 

      there's a trick. 

letting the memory of the fire be just that; a remembrance of what was, rather than dreaming it to higher heights. when beauty becomes virtued, here's where the ugly spiral turns...where the soul(s) dig to earth center in search of past flame, failing to see the truth.

        the flame's dead.

that doesn't make it less real; it still kept the souls warm for a spell & their licks were theirs & no one was brave enough to touch them. but the soul can't be time-capsuled & neither can clocks & a moment lived is stuck behind glass. the souls see the imprints & wish it had stayed, but birth of once bright always seems to be daughter of ash.

thinking of those flames & the papered lesson they learned, it reminds me of the year i thought was stolen. with the turned backs & the dark night & the uniforms that made him disappear behind bar. i built my life in those mountains on a tower & hoped i'd someday return to the regal life once lived.

but the earth kept spinning & the backs stayed turned & no parades presented themselves to welcome me back home. i kept waiting for all the dark to ash, for the phoenix to rise; i kept hoping for my return to my towers, liberated & loved. 

then the wind spoke up & i knew; the parade was never to be & my castle to be abandoned & my heart shattered in time. his words & his wrath ruined the foundation of my pretty days i'd lived in that deserted forest. i withered with the unjust turned backs & the dreams of hours & bliss passed. i became one of those fires souls beating my hands against the glass; i hadn't learned that a splintered clock still can't turn back.

and somehow, the truth sank. the backs would stay turned & those bright desert days were long buried, but my heart hasn't lost beat. i still carry those days & the bloom those mountains wrought. i'm better for losing the faces attached to the turned backs & there are other mountains that shine. the truth sank.

i thought they broke me, but she's alive & well.

she may have shifted & her soul more lined, but she hasn't gone. 

& suddenly i returned to the castle to destroy its false promise.

brick

by

brick.

freedom is sweet, & my soul's grinning for it.