Oxygen
June 15 2006


Living in a tinderbox
you learn not to play with matches.
But just scratch us
and underneath this fear we are all pyromaniacs
— eyes glinting with incendiary light,
hypnotized by the flames licking higher.

Two tips to survive fire:
stay low
and have an exit plan.
Because if you don’t die by heat or by smoke
it will be suffocation
as the inferno sucks all the air from the room.
So it’s oxygen that’s the poison gas
and we are merely fuel.

It slowly consumes us,
corroding the body from the inside-out
like creeping rust.
And just a little too much
would tip the planet into spontaneous combustion,
entire forests exploding into fire
with the sound of a thousand locomotives bearing-down at once
— leaving underground
the last safe place to run.

The very first life was anaerobic;
so that in the beginning
oxygen was instant death
and the earth uninhabitable.
Yet anaerobes still thrive underground,
in the soil, and in deep subterranean strata;
shielded from the toxic atmosphere
of this rare blue-and-green planet.