It has become an incorrigible habit

doing this, an innocent addiction

folding ashes to elegies,

pages fluttering to dust

twisted inside,

slow parching of the paragraphs,

I consume prose and set it alight,

a morbid obsession,

a novelists jealously

but don’t jump to put it out

cast those ashes,

let them call me

to tacit thoughts that cannot still-

feed my mundane longing

into something…

like this.