It was a pleasure to burn. Clean white houses, kerosene light, the city breathing ash. Mildred in her seashell shell, forever elsewhere. Then Clarisse: “Are you happy?” — a match to the nerve. Rain on her face, the moon in the leaves, and I’d been walking numb through the smoke of my own name. She smelled like rain. I had forgotten rain. It was a pleasure to burn. “Burn all, burn everything.” Fire that makes the surface sing, and the mind unseal. It was a pleasure to burn. Not glory — a fever, a clean bright lie that feels too real. The Mechanical Hound waits without a breath. Beatty with his polished words, a knife in the lecture. “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine,” so I hid what I stole and learned the shape of danger. “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.” So I ran with the wound, with words in the marrow. “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while.” Through the ruin, the old sentence kept burning. It was a pleasure to burn. “Burn all, burn everything.” Ash for the obedient, and then the ache of knowing. It was a pleasure to burn. But the fire can fail, and the hidden mind keep growing. Then the bombs came down. The river carries us on. “Stuff your eyes with wonder.” Ash falling. Pages turning. A world beginning hard. And the dark, at last, is not empty.
