I, the Spark

Manholes clatter under my toes—

clanky clankity

click click—

and lick my chin with sewer breath.

The wind is my carriage!

I smell pine needles burning

in the throats of chimneys,

and watch a few tawny towers cough into the air.

I bite into my lip and taste my own fire.

It tastes the way the street used to sound at midnight—

little Aaron Graves tip-toeing down Columbia

after we tossed rocks through the eyes

of forgotten depots, when the wind

was not my carriage, but a conspirator,

and the rocks were not rocks,

but napalm.

We ran where fallen apples

lay rotting in corner lots,

where two toothless men

shared a brown-bagged forty

because they had forgotten to turn off their ovens.

Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, they said,

the charred cookies of childhood

burning in their minds.

We were as hopeful as hand grenades,

swinging streetlights at stray cats,

and fastening shadows like capes.

Rhino trudged there along the gutters,

watching for hellions below the street drain.

Swallow me up! He’d cry,

when rivers threw back the covers,

when the moon took a shot in the jaw,

when something whispered flicker

from a leaky conduit.

While rubbery trees wriggle in a puddle,

I fit my memories in a tumbler of whiskey,

which I chase with water

to douse my flames.