Warmth for ice pack burned hands

It is summer outside this gate.
But warmth cannot trick its way through the window creeks,
This house is too smart.
And my hands tremble with ice pack burns,
as the smoke dances, stretches its way outwards,
like a tumor, like
matter too massive to be contained.
In this house, smoke is god.
Which is to say, in this house, you are god.
You breathed out the smoke,
with fists that spoke with hot anger.
Who would have known,
that hands can speak, can raise a house from the ground up.
But I did not know
another language.
Except that of tongues that burn like iron metal,
and that of tongues that bit themselves into silence.
Yours was the iron, and mine, the mute.
This house is too small.
So the smoke hurls itself into my stomach and across my throat cage,
And I, fragile and flammable,
kneel helplessly, bend my way into the corners of the leftover space.
And I grow smaller, even when my legs stretch wider,
they can walk faster now.
So I start walking, far from the smoke.
But the music brings me back.
Sometimes, you play music so beautiful that I can no longer see the smoke,
with soft, symphonic chords that ring like church bells,
and quench the fire like holy water,
And teaches me warmth in sound,
in a misguided sense,
but even the curtains begin to waltz,
And I cannot hear the warning pitches,
the dark measure of tragedy that
sinks itself into this gift of a melody.
So I stop running, and I walk into the music
that blinds me from seeing the smoke,
it chokes my body against the cuffed chimney.
But the composed repetition of melodies I've carved into my head,
ring loudly, tune out what I cannot yet accept.
So I tell myself,
that you are the music and not the smoke,
that the music and the smoke do not belong to the same house.
You are a good man.
You are a good man.
But my legs cannot stretch any wider
to fold themselves into this cramped space
and still fit.
So I must run now.
Until I can finally feel warmth
from my beaten but beating breathe
against the metal steeling wheel
upon these cold, ice burned hands.

This damn poetry

This damn poetry brings

lonely into my company
is the bed for my restlessly alive eyes.
This flawed perfection, this artistic genius
This damn poetry
is the lullaby sang the night before a revolution
is the leftover minds of soldiers after a clean death
is the best arithmetic proof of God.