Aura

I sit in the black leather chair meditating on the plume of smoke that rises in the air, riffling the pages of my life as if it were a book of poems, flipping through past & future. If I go back, back, back, riding the plume of smoke, I find I died in childbirth in another life, died by fire in the life before that, died by water twice, or more. I pick out days & relive them as if I were trying on dresses. When the future beckons, I follow, riding another plume of smoke, feeling the barrier between skin & air evaporate, & my body disappear like the myth it is. My cheeks burn against the air, flaming where two elements collide & intermingle becoming one. Oh explosion at the body's edge! I live on a ledge of time, gazing at the infinite.