Fire reads poems.

Fire assigns punctuation.

Fast fire with charred eyes

flips pages with flaming fingers.

Who will read verses,

etched in embers.

Burned out words. Decomposed syllables.

Distorted letters.

An impaled head

writes verses under closed eyelids.

Sings us a black poem

inaudibly from the slit throat.

Fair-haired poems burn with fire in their hair.

Nightingales burn above the nightingale city

with singed wings, with the burned-out

warble in their beaks.

Roses burn in the walled gardens.

Brothels burn, the minaret rods break.

Churches burn.

In the fire a charred question,

what is a poem.

The faces of clocks burn,

set ablaze all at once.

The time past, the future time

dart from the flames of the present time.

On the question what is death,

blood drips

from the fatal wound of the just born.

woman from a desert

has breasts of sand (red)

her navel is a hollow in the sand

as if drilled by a sandpiper

there is skin between her thighs

moist sand: out of it grow

ever-changing desert flowers

opening their wet mouths

into the sand

when he touches the woman from the desert

she is red fire

her hair flames blue

it swirls red from her navel

the orchid between her legs doesn’t burn

but grows larger

envelopes him with flowery lips

with mouths mouths everywhere

as they cry out scorched

they disintegrate into red sand

the woman from the desert vanishes

he looks for her in the sand

finds no trace of her in the sandy sheets