built to destroy.
it spawns into existence and snowballs like a star,
collapses in on itself and it’s like nothing ever happened.
a self cleaning oven. a sun. prodigal or otherwise.

lost,
might be another way to put it.
left to it’s own devices too long.
not to be trusted with its own firey blood.
you could smell the sulfur fumes for miles,
smoke signals curling into angry fists
scraping the sky, looking for a fight.
what is there to fight?

it may have been too long.
calcified in the meantime, turned to stone.
statue of limitations. know what I mean?
I was going to say something, I was.
strong and bright, like a lawyer in
a wooden shoebox court room.
but it’s been too long.
it all burned up when I wasn’t looking.
anything to keep warm.

built like a mismanaged forest
that catches fire and it’s
relief more than anything else.
summer summaries, I was young once.
thirsty like a brown suburb lawn.
there’s only two ways something like that can go.
both are endings. none more righteous than
the other side of the godamn coin.

planned obsolescence. everything becomes useless
and defunct and split into parts
that make no sense on their own.
distributive property, never done properly.
dispersal, that’s how trees reproduce
and also how I lose myself.
how it loses itself.

not everything can be put back together
and you can’t always just turn the stone back over
and walk away. drag yourself away.
when it ends, when it slows to crawl,
what will be remembered?
what particular particulate matter
will make a home in its body forever?