Mercy

The instruction is clear: be obliterated. By which god and
his devil, I don’t know. What; what to do? Let the wildfire
run its sticky fingers ablaze my shiny, new wings and pluck
them clean off, even after all that precious time spinning silk.
Maybe even this cruelty has its place. On a walk up a desert
mountain, late summer in heat, bleeding the aroma of sage
as if its incessant need to purify doesn’t teeter on the edge of
crusade, I dragged my feet along the wide dirt trail spiraled
into the mountain’s hipbone by some long-sleeved and
straight-faced looking men. I saw two snakes, or one that was
following me, and I had a kindling desire to trip on something
but found nothing to trip on.

How; how to find oblivion?

To my left, my shadow stretched far into the brush that ate at
the fringes of the trail. Shadow cast itself over thorned and
tangled weeds, stems with dried flowers, and incarnate snakes
who left my greetings unrequited. Underneath my splayed
darkness, a tarantula crawled back into its hole, and I felt a
scorching desire to fall but could find nothing to fall in. “My
shadow goes places I cannot go,” I said, and I burned to know
what it felt like to clamber that deep into the wild past these
pathways that we’ve plowed for ourselves.

What; what’s it like to exist by way of the sun?

When it went down, I started to worry. I smelled the sage, heard
the cracking of bones, or branches, but could see only the
darkness of a relentless potentiality. My shadow disappeared,
or it became part of everything. The trail fell away, or black
cast its mercy over it. Where; where to go to get obliterated?

Every night, the world relinquishes its shapes so we might
somehow find the courage to set fire to our own.