The Salamander

The salamander runs on crooked legs through the city

welcome and applauded thanks to minds eager for fireworks.

It does not need to hide in the shadows, forcing its

opponents to seek shelter there instead.

The dim glow of a reading light beneath the covers

illuminates black text inked into nutmeg scented paper

thin as the breath between my teeth as I absorb

more than the sum of the words but the sum of the ‘I’.

The salamander is our hero, the best friend of bliss.  It alone

can promise not to compromise smiles with unfiltered reality.

Its tongue darts faster than the eye can follow and before long

Huck is off his fence and the white paint has spilled over everything.

Somewhere far off a siren wails but it is as if it is in another

land far beyond my reach.  Blinking becomes an infuriating

necessity that delays my overcharged brain’s feast.  I engorge

myself on literature.  Asimov, Orwell, Tolstoy, and Stein.

The salamander hunts without tire.  It compromises the machine,

the printing and the printers, the publishers and the published.

Talons work from the inside, pushing the former gods out

and replacing them with fifty shades of hollow replicas.

Montag flees the Hound, McMurphy suffocates beneath

the pillow.  And the I beneath the sheets sweats and feels visceral

and finds on every page I and I and me and I.  The pages

are soaked in humanity as I am soaked in humanity evermore.

The salamander is my enemy.  The salamander sniffs the air with

its tongue and looks for me.  It fears me knowing my I.  It fears

others knowing theirs.  It wants us to smile and laugh until we

can’t be anything else.  The salamander burns away the I in us.

The fires are already burning.  I seek to douse them in ink.