in parentheses

I was a young boy blind to an abounding pain when first the flame came to me and opened vision in a night’s embrace and then left me bleeding running behind a trail of smoke. So I toiled night and day that the two ceased to seem and time became one madness stoked.

It was only in words that I came ever to see the flame again, in moments of fury, when at the bounds of myself I shattered me and sent me down all the rivers on the wind, to reach for forever, but always catching only the tail of a smoke. And from there came pain, a constant lingering pain, a pain of capture and a pain of loss, but go on, go on to the pain beyond pain, said I, to the pain of the truth of vision, in the opening of a flame.

So I took to learning then. And through the years I began to steel my fury. I learned how to bend its fire to shape the cloam of a blank page and learned when to quell its burn and when to give it its birthsignet flight. And this ritual I never ceased, but no labour was it as it was in the earlier days, fore after the years the fury spoke to me the secret of the erasure of all bounds. So I set me ablaze and was reborn into fury’s way.

But in the time since where and what has fury brought me?, fore fury has no binding and bounds noward. To the wharf of the flame I have not moored me onto since beginning, though I have seen it in pockets of burning clouds, and in the blue passages of one’s eyes, and in the perdurable endurance of one mother, yet have I had my love again: won’t you come into me, in but a naked summer song or a silent winter whisper, and teach me the lesson of what is beyond this fury’s way?

Still I write, with ardour on high awaiting the advent of flame’s return.