what is to break? to be broken? to fall out into nothingness, or to be strangled by Stranger in a Friend mask, cloaked by illusions of love, imagined god, epitome of eternal beauty in a gross world? i have had visions of falling in and out of smoke clouds breathed from a thousand burning trees in California, where there is no life to catch me. because they are dying, and because i am invisible. they are screaming in their caps of orange flame, crying to the sky for pity. pleading to the god unknown to all but wild things and wild souls.  they are wallowing in their earthen beds. they are aflame. they are illuminated.

the light is beautiful, i realize, as i touch the first limbs of the furnace. my bones are hot irons, now that sear my transparent flesh, cooking insides; glowing skeleton; Halloween display hanging from the corner of an elderly couple's porch, swaying in the wind as children, frightened and nervous, slowly climb the wooden steps to the door.  glow-in-the-dark bones dancing in the night air, as i dance in fire. one, embracing the moving; the other, the forever unmoving. stillness and death. but there is no death for me in imaginings. i continue to fall, through smoke and flame, and trees. down to where the sky begins again, because there is no end in all things. because i have never really been broken. even in thought. there is no mercy in matter.

-OPHELIA