《鈥疢》/ "Holmium Home"

The upstairs rooms ooze sticky heat.
Each doorway is blocked by
A wall of dense hot air.
My computer too emblazons its infrared mark
On my desk,
My arms,
My hands
The windows are open, to let in air flow,
But the stagnant musk of summer clings stubbornly
To the sun-lit, sunlighted, yellow sun-shaded walls.
Hot dusty air kicked up by the fire chickens outside bathing
In the grassless yard is the only thing to greet me
Whether I come in or go out.
The poor cat has resorted to lying
Incapacitated on the hardwood floors
Waiting for some salvatory cool that never wafts its wondrous ways through the
windows
I crank up the dials and press the buttons and blast the A/C,
But the artificial content only dries the sweat on my body.
This heat is not the dry heat of my birthplace, a land of red sands and wind-swept
plains, and shady pecan trees
There, the fiery temperatures are rivalled only by rolling, twisting, serpentine coils of levies alongside shady cypresses, meandering rivers, and basking reptiles
My body can take that heat.
This heat is not the humidity of my home, the land where I grew tall in the bamboo
clumps and honeysuckle bushes and celadon ponds,
Watered by the sweat of work or play, sweat wasn't choked or parched but flowed
freely in my home, nestled between the tubs and jugs of water in the cupped hands
of green, yellow, black dragon-rivers
My body loved that heat.
The forecasts climb higher, the newsmen babbling their twisted ascendency
Are these the purging flames I feel or the brimstone hellfire?
This, this smothering warmth, the hearth now a wildfire, this feels like summer?
There is a heat inside my body too,
The heat of a wick stuck in its melted gooey pool of wax
The heat of a machine spinning in its cycles of torment
The heat of a beast under burden of the weight of its labour
I release in ways I can, but the frantic fervent ways give way as my legs
Lose strength looking for an oasis
No, my body was not made for this heat
Ashen-grey pottery that burst of steam when exposed to licks of flame in the warm
kiln of their creator
Now get their burning chemical signals in their fortress made of asphalt, concrete,
glass,
Their kindling shelter that is thirsting to life again as liquids in some blazing
red-hot furnace.