Fever

Imagine a suit of armor cast of fire, the mail writhing like snakes- more threat than protection, but protection enough. For those lucky few.

Imagine being smothered on the hottest day in August. Not silk, nothing cool. Your final, dying gasps are beastly hot and you expire with no memory of comfort.

Imagine falling into the dunes in the desert with the merciless Sun screaming and screaming down at you. your tongue is a blackened bit of leather in your mouth. The wind buries you alive in sand. In death, you dream only of thirst.

It's enough to drive a grown man crazy, enough to make a young girl forget her first love. Madness is what it is, when the mind burns faster than lungs, legs, eyes.

Remember the old days, the newer ones, when they piled heaps and heaps of wood and set the piles ablaze. Ash. In the end, all was ash, but before that, they were voices that screamed like the Sun in the deserts. Children whose eyes clouded over then burst like crones' eyes. Women whose babies boiled inside their bodies. Men that couldn't love like they had to. In the end, the smoke cleared and they were all ash.

Look Further withing Us. Behold the beating heart, whose still-pumping ventricles sent virgins into ecstasy. Rejoice in the hiss, the evil-smelling smoke, as the coals devour it.

We have lived in Hell, exulted, craved, feared it. We'll never know It, yet there are redes and laws that govern, that tell who will escape into coolness and who are condemned.

This could also have been titled: "Shout Out to Matt McLaughlin. California's Really Proud"