My Crown of Honor

As if it is my crown of honor,
I set my hair on fire
each morning.

Rolling out of sleep,
I gather matches and gas
from beneath my mattress
and ignite the nappy mass.
It snaps and cracks as a whisper of flame
speaks its pungent descriptions.
The heat increases, reaching toward my eyebrows.
I watch the flux-form shadows of my thoughts
weave the wall with calm confusion.

Somewhere behind my eyes,
the orange ember of my brain
clicks and ticks and clicks and ticks and clicks and ticks,
distilling my head full of
futures and memories down
into a fragile stack of ash,
a cloud of 10,000 clouds
piled like gravity likes its pages:
still enough to fathom
the frenzy in any movement.


30ish minutes later, I rise,
make my bed
and start the day.


I put my head beneath
the bathroom spigot
and smell the fire's fragrance
stain the water.
Flowing down the drain,
it's already found its ocean.
My hair grows back almost
immediately, or at least before
I get on the 9AM train and need
to plot my angles to an empty seat
or dual for dominance
at the ticket wicket.

But, even come afternoon,
when my hair gets wild and fucked up again,
there remains some trace
of the morning's combustion
to insulate myself
from too much me.



by jerry gordon
1.14.10