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I also cannot transcribe fire accurately.

There’s a dust planet between

You and your body on fire, 

In that smoke how do you walk?

.1

This essay

asks into 

 the warping motion of self–

immolation. These

splits crop up between

lines, enjambments,

variable feet shuffling to 

accord rhythm

pace, intent, gait, methods

of walking that go

onward but sideways, back

towards, away from, and there,

its own direction. 

Lodgepole

seeds which need fire 

to crack and begin

their

flowering

 not to say 

cig ash boring a hole

in the

canopies

 but dead not being dead,

trunks, branches, birds

martyrs

for light

to hit the stem and root

it is a rare and precarious

mad

tool

invoked inside the wordless

time, a womb opening out

into

fire

the lodgepole pine resin

melts; here, split

seeds in

spring

.2 (fire, prehistory, etymology)

Fire

Fire, too, strays directionless

almost up, a reaching, outwards,

undoing ribbons of wind, all

sediment of space

travels, our infernal ship, these

small sun flecks,

Incan gold, an intervention

into nothing, blazing

life and death as shadows

of the brazen light, eternal

points of arrogant heat kindle

on, in tiny letters, specks of

ash make known all found

forms and ages; every day we 

walk through fire. 

Prehistory

Before Vietnam, 

the undying body on fire 

was set aside for faith,

messianic rind spitting

spilling mortal borders, skin popping

by God’s grace; Old Believers

turned their tendons stark

against the Antichrist

patriarch of Moscow, thousands

lighting the hinterlands, caustics

melting the snow. Autocremation

as a spectacle, in China, began

the chapter on abandoning the body,

across the spectrum of the sangha

as a means to awaken. Soteriologies

and deliverances occurred within

the heady wrath of consumed incense

oils crying from within the

digestive tracts of want.

Etymology

 Immolation

is a latin derivative meaning

a sacrifice of grain (“molare”),

or to grind, to sharpen; the

same root takes us into our jaw,

millstone molars, that take

the small mites of earth, disintegrate

into something stomachable,

not tearing but powdering into 

dust, particulate; these

sacrificial elements of the word

come into effect as a spilling

of wheat (see; millstone, trituratory)

on granite, unflinching altar

or to sacrifice to feudal lord as 

fealty. to give up that which is

essential in the name of 

that which- through the act- you place

atop your wretched

self, immolated and begone.

Along the ridgelines of Gehenna you walk

alone, its high skies and dead 

bureaucrats lying mangled by such

arsonists who starved its chapels

of children.

Eucalyptus 

Deny myself

where do I go then?

Deny myself

seep, enter this way

Militance;

one plosive

is enough

for the head

.3 (Vietnam, body-world, and then)

Vietnam, Sri Lanka, USA

You have seen him- Thích 

Quảng Đức; face stricken

in polite dignity, relinquishing;

monks with petrol canisters

summoning white journalists from hotels

with cameras, canonising

a transference from body into symbol

secularising immolation from

a conversation with the divine to an

instruction to all bodies; it was

a motion, a politicisation

of oblivion; this all changes,

turns war on its head. Gasoline and

film- it is a technological

and commodity driven shift, accessible

movable; fire passing over

the Pacific as a harbour move,

shattering California drydocks carting

Mccarthyism into the orient like a 

liver bursting pus, a splattering, a

Sri Lankan nurse flies from a rooftop,

obliges life to halt, but not, not to die–

but to scream; you weep for Vietnam, but–

I die, I die too, and what for me? From

the heights of the ministry of health four hundred

Singhalese girls, starving in their own

land, yell from the mouth of Vidanage Vinitha, grinding

the language of femicide to a foul grunt. This

is no funeral pyre, 

not about death, but

transmission of flesh into

message; iconography of crackling

bodies like a lamp, a lump; Norman Morrison

talks to Robert McNamara on

the grounds of the fat Pentagon, alight

below his office; Quakers,

Methodists, 

Body-World

still this soulsalvo clings to 

faith! An ionic bond which shatters

in the land of the light of a thousand

suns; it is the twentieth century, and

everything can burn, even the

smallest moment is fodder

for commerce and flak, the urge

crystallises in the torpor of

lumber and lithium, coal and coral

corralling this force 

of swallowing imperial heat, all

is on the table, and the table

is raised high to avoid the heat beckoning

from the blanket hiding thick

molten heaving belches, gash

sweating metals from the ore. 

and then

Families

curse the petroleum

age for making it cheap

to burn their daughters, for

biomass compressing under

mesopotamian weight, brokered

by British extractivism, tilling

the djinns coaxed out from beneath

the hot scent of the face

of earth; plastic nothings holding 

eternities; jerry cans leaking

martyrdom and as many tears,

as many tears furrowing

the beginnings of loss, opalescent 

upon the heady brows bridging

eyes watching flickering self deplete

and disseminate into the thin

air of everything, everybody else. So many 

riots, ammunitions, and

innovations, blank messiahs

to paint our dreams across

with everything else being as it is. Musa Mamut–

to be deported from his Crimean kitchen

douses, rubs, spreads, sets

the thing off. Says someone

had to do this,” does it– this martyrdom-

Lighters and matchsticks

and soot. Wits end. What more. Take

holding and cut it in half. What is

your face doing on the television?

What is your name doing in the light

? The smoke fills in the gaps, the 

newspapers cover the windows

of all the houses left behind. Nobody

goes outside. And yet

this is history, this is the christened

name of human life, decorated

with such cases as yours and then what?

Aeropetes

some fuck each other

primarily in spaces of

immeasurable pain

Cyrtanthus Ventricosus 

germinate only when

they inhale smoke, to

be fucked raw by mad

table mountain butterflies

during austral summer

beetles chase fire to

lay eggs; fire is a rare

moment of giving way

pain activates

dormant bodies

like a wire

.4 (act, tabu, spectacle)

Act

Sometimes the “Chinnaswamy effect,” a farmer

“plan(s) to die in order to protect Tamil,” against

Hindi supremacist linguistic encroachment, burn to speak, weltschmerz

elevating the political into the spiritual, yet

the vast majority of self immolations are unheard of

and forgotten; most words in any given language

are not used; more still are not heard; sentences string out

to dry amidst paragraphs and paragraphs of empty

slogan and black rhetoric; symbols pass; 

Ta bu

taboo can

slip you into the fabric of discourse or

the cave of moment, burning for language–

this is my tongue and upon it saliva evaporates

into a pumice-stone brain for the sake of 

the way you talk to me like i am 

nothing whilst i feel all of this inside me, all this

keeping the voice hot, glistening, sweat

coalescing into verb, diminishing noun into tar

all of this inside of me, no reasonable

expulsion, forests fall to no great applause

acres melt into each other, the surface ripples

Spectacle

USA t shirt on the white house lawn, two thousand

and nineteen, Gupta- i ignore 

them all- another hall

of emptied eyes, cracks

in a grey sky morning, red 

extinguishers clothing spectacle

dressed for bedraggled publics

lensed, compacted, 480p, picked

apart by jackdaws and strewn along 

fiber optic tubes pulped pumped

castrated in a thousand clinical op-eds

decrying, bemoaning, repleting

liberal psyche with more menial

lard to butter the body with 

and serve to the populace as desire

repulsive in its emptiness; enough body

doing without lung and spine, no exalting

for fear of drawing the backlash of

an inward breath, no out for the fear of in, no

in for the yearning for out, neither

if the skin is aflame! cut, defamed, borne

from itself; gutless gut reaction

nineteen ninety three world health organisation

instructs media against suicide contagion:

Hide the cadaver! Cover the ground!

laws of imitation, promulgation

of blasphemies against the burning

body, I want none of this–

either we look or something looks for us

I can’t say everything

something about sacrifice / something 

about self harm / something about 

helplessness / something about want / 

something about legacy and 

ego / something about getting in the car / 

and driving / and getting there / reaching 

out / and

starting the livestream / and watching 

the camera / and the street shifts / and 

a fire extinguisher, a quieter world, a 

dud / something livid / in the core left / behind 

.5 (…and who shall I say is calling?)

a full moon

prolapses

into a star

a comet

gestures

to its kin

white spore

look up

the sun

is speaking

and what

there is the text

why are you here

it is written

in soot on a sidewalk