Jelaluddin Rumi baked his heart into kindling
in the kiln of awareness. When he met Shams of Tabriz
it was as if passing a flame from one candle to the next.
Both were consumed in a blaze of ecstasy.

This poem is a cigarette butt tossed into the brush,
an unattended campfire, a meth lab hotplate, static electricity
on the Hindenburg’s docking tower in Lakehurst NJ,
James Cagney on a burning oil rig: “Top of the world, ma!” the plutonium core that ignites a thermonuclear bomb.

Look around for sparks of rapture. Frayed wiring
and overloaded outlets surround you. Someone’s jammed
pennies in the fuse box, packed the garage with oily rags,
and left a space heater too close to the curtains.

Why conjugate verbs on an electric typewriter
at a desk filthy with asbestos dust? Haul that pile
of soggy newspapers out from behind your bulletproof vest!
How can you create light without heat?

JON WESICK is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, who’s published hundreds of poems and stories. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. This poem appeared on the Tales from the Moonlit Path website, Issue 4, August 2006 and in his collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom.