Joseph Anthony’s Reviews > Voice of the Fire > Status Update

Beneath the base of every flame, there is a still, clear absence; a mysterious gap between the death of substance & the birth of light, w/ time itself suspended in the void of transformation, this strange pause between two elements. I understand it now, that there has only ever been one fire, that blazed before the world began & shall not be put out until the world is done. I see in the flame…the unborn & the dead

The burning & the song are one. If I gaze hard with the black jewel that is my only eye, I see the spit and flare of it, aware they’re in the centre of that cold, wet coal where is my night. It was my friends they set alight, not I. I was denied that last deliverance, to be consumed within that timeless bright that is in truth one single blaze decanted down across the aeons.

I am so afraid. I’m afraid of being dead, I’m afraid of being nothing, & that great unease that I have kept so long at bay is made companion to me now. I see the life of me, the life of all of us, our wars & copulations, all of our movement & philosophy & conscience, & there is no floor beneath it, & it stands on naught. Beyond my window, early, stars emerge into a firmament with purpose fled.

My path of thoughts is therefore drawn from all the paths about me in the truth of life. These territories that we span are as like spanned within, where there are monuments of notion, chasms, peaks and streams for night-thoughts there to spawn.

Below my fur and naked save my fancy-beads, my eyes are shut but not my ears. Her words float through me. Essence. Spirit-ore. The hobbles of the flesh. Change. Be transformed, refigured in the passion, passion, passion ash…

Turns he now bout, that one edge of he’s frightening face is all with bright, and sun blood wet on branch-horns of he. Glean I Hob is not of dirt, as is I and I’s walking-people, born of dirt and live by dirt and put to dirt and all. He is of fire. Fire’s black bout of his eyes. Fire’s blood on of he’s horns.