was grown in an oven

they named me 
residue
ash for short

once swept out of their hearth
was tossed
left traces on everything

was born again in a dustbin

emptied into 
a heap on the curb
blew around a lot

they called me mistake and
stain
though I answered to neither saying

ash, ash I am 

holding a little heat but not to
smolder
like a resentment

would prefer
to warm a garden
blend into fertile soil

unhated 

It’s not my problem, I scream,
not my sad planet to save anymore.

Let others do the work of salvation;
I’m not going to be here long enough

to bask in any light
from a saved world, and in truth

I don’t believe in its salvation:
at best that’s a dim light 

everyone’s scrambling toward.
Again: this isn’t my job — 

I’m over halfway
to my own last days.

I’m mostly racing the darkness
to see which of us falls first; still,

the bedraggled world
keeps coming 

and begging for me
to ease its suffering,

even if just a little.
Did I stutter, I wonder,

when I asked the world
to let me off its hook?

Maybe that was not a stutter.
Maybe that was my voice

pushed through a shiver; perhaps
I have to consider other possibilities — 

cold as the wind is,
perhaps I am colder;

if I am not the peace,
perhaps I am the war.  

I bend back to this work
after days of fire, my feet 
gray with ash; swear that

these tracks, these
proofs of memory, will be more
than grief’s dust, more than tracings

of what was, instead
will become maps, urgings,
soil in which to grow — what?

Sustenance? Tinder
for new fire? Not my place
to know; I bend back 

to work, always
to Work — mindful
of Fire, pushing off

my own need to Burn.

This face, exemplar
of no remorse — its
pale nerve-laced skin
twitching, its stare, 
its thin, sharp nose; 

that fear
in those hollow eyes
brimming over,
spilling onto those lips,
flavoring each word they spill 
with hate
because 
fear becomes hate 
when exposed
to open air,

and once fear
flowers into hate
it cannot easily unbloom
and furl back toward
innocence
from that urgent, ugly
canker-state:

fear
turned to hate dares 
not regret anything
as doing so may expose
how little it ever had to fear
from the beginning — hence

this face, exemplar
of no remorse with unrelenting
stare, almost as if a mirror
were before you unblinking,
but that isn’t your face
in the news — 

it’s something
at once more unsettled
and unsettling:
a face that could be
any face, a face grown
so commonplace
you almost don’t give it
a second glance.

any open door
that can be closed and locked is
a good advisor

in the moment when
it snugs into its frame
I learn what I need

about safety and peace
achieved through insulation
from the other side

(no matter where I
make my stand I stand behind
or before a door)

Where I am
is standing still,
facing forward.

A seeming windowpane
separates me from 
the next place I should be:

I poke it with a single finger
then press on it with first one
and then both hands.

It bends, does not break,
warps and distorts but
will not allow me 
entrance

but I keep pushing…
it’s sad, or it feels
sad. It’s not sad
in fact, it is just a matter of
fact that

it takes a long time
for such a barrier to yield
and one must push
and push and sometimes 

kick 
to break it. To break it
and step through

to the new life that I think
will seem not much different
at first — it looks much the same
over there, but that light…

imagine
how my familiar things
may look in that light:

some dingy,
some more lovely, some
likely revealed as utterly
not what they once seemed.

For all that may be possible
over there

I keep pressing, poking,
gently, strongly; I keep 
pressing forward.