Tellus is a highly flammable balsa backdrop,
bulging with breeding frenzy

The conifer belt, the Earth's crown of thorns,
is the tinder;
Homo sapiens, with its threadbare metabolism;
the firestarter

Humankind
is self-assured & puffed-up; overpopulated,
soap-bubble fragile, adrift with J. Kerouac
and his playmate Death,
who pulls his beard-braid, MC-club patriarch-style,
and mutters, ”Hell yes, hell yes!”
as Tuonela's black swan rises from Saimaa
on smoking wings,
and the hammer-blows of Ilmarinen
ring through the afterburner chamber
of a hangover headache;
the spindly autumn ruins of Dorisburg,
delicate against the burn scars
of the horizon

Yet the cosmos kindly allows the Silvercat
to stand kneading
upon my chest
in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
deep beneath the Perseids' passage,
during a pause
in my honorary duties