Notre Dame is burning

The burning of Notre Dame

today I watched it burn,
though I could not smell the smoke
I still somehow felt the heat
of that fire, engulfing my own
tinderbox notions of longevity,
my heart reduced to kindling
in this caged body
made of stick and straw,

and as that spire crumbled
into a billowy cloud of black,
cancer cells stacking themselves
upward into a heaven
mighty and blue,
red sparks poked

their frayed fingers through
like dying demons begging
for water from behind a curtain,
I wondered if anything
ever stays pure, ever remains untouched
and untwisted by the chomping
teeth of time’s relentless decay,

I remembered myself,
walking amongst the aisles
of so many abandoned artifacts
once held dear and cherished
in the homes of the countless dead,
antiques now piled and priced
according to a rarity
arbitrarily assigned to junk,

I found myself thinking of my own home
and its swelling horde of possessions
seeming to multiply of their own
accord, an inorganic mitosis of greed
or some semblance of anchoring
a foundation, existence too deep-rooted
to ever be undone in the eyes of a fool,
and I am that fool,
waving good-bye now
to Notre Dame, to Paris, to the streets
sinking in Amsterdam,
to the honey bee, to the mosquito,
to America and the American Dream,
to the final frontier
humanity was never meant to see.