Pipesmoke

Another 3 a.m. poem. :) I suddenly wondered what it would be like to be smoked in a pipe (since I had been looking at Magritte's paintings again) and this poem was born. From my collection "Tales From the Fireside"

 

 

Through the air
I'm tumbled into a mahogany net

Dark, musing pattern like a false map
I lick the wooden walls
acrid with varnish and soot
smooth from thumbstrokes

I stand but I cannot peer over the side,
so I bury myself in the carpet of leaves

Woolen and fibrous
camel-coated between my legs
urticating hairs in my lungs
but sweetly scented in my drowning mind

Snow begins and buries me further in the warm cradle

A fleshy granite

Descends and crushes my body into the turf

Sparking sand flies through the air as the phosphorus farewells to the grains

A gentle subterranean breeze teases my rump, huddling the leaves close together

Wooden scrap phoenix
tiny as a bead
red hot needle point feathers
tail extending in an ashy wavery plume

Descends into the leaves above and alights
extinguishing its life to begin again
borne along the forest-floor breeze
it flares into a new bird, then fades
leaving only one pricking feather
sparking the woolen leaves and my skin

Hairs seared away, tiny candle wicks
slowly spreading into every pore
sparks separated until they expand to encloak me
in dried flaming magma

Another windgust and my charcoaled body departs from the world of flame and transitions to the world of air as a million black chars forming a thin silk, weaving through the curved ebony path to meet your lips at the ivory doorway

A return to heat, but dampness as well
no light, just rushing air and pounding liquid iron
through a living labyrinth into red tunnels

Soon I must depart, so I wave goodbye to some of me going on to fuel your body with invigorating poison

The rest rushes out on a reverse airflow
splitting in two paths back into the outside

After the heat of the flame and the body
I'm cold here
the molecules move more slowly in this place
but they soon dissipate my remaining particles
leaving me scattered
through the air