The hottest places? No.
Even Dante knew better —
he never said this.
The cold places — the ones
where a candle
in the crisis wind freezes
into a red icicle of pointless pose —
that’s where they belong. Can’t you
hear them sniffling about,
wriggling on the fence?
Those of us
who cannot cease raging
and roaring —
we may be wrong,
may ultimately burn in the fiery levels
for what we believe or rise
toward the glorious sun — in fact
we may not believe
in heaven or hell but
we believe in heat; maybe
because we were born to it,
maybe because we were
schooled in it, maybe because
it found us and we survived —
however it happened,
burning
is all we know.
