Aphorism 33: Life is a Flame That Burns Itself Out

--John Blair

There’s a mirror burnished bright

onto the concave curve of bone inside

the back of a human skull and it holds

an image of the many qualia of ergo sum

upside down like a country doctor

dangling a baby by its ankles before

the slap    and in one blink of a newborn’s

eye a strange loop burps fractal

from its own reflection into puzzles

of an eye for an I    and the  I

that wants and wants and never stops

emerges from chaos   to rage

like a rat-king tangled with itself

inside the walls of a house that isn’t

a house but an orb made of veins

and dirt as though every single thing

is alive in the way that this child’s

one inverted self is alive and all of it

is tinder dry and just beginning

   in utter ecstasy to burst

into the raw blue flames of extinction.