My furnace breathes before me,
a gray giant, all steel and brick
shuddering red-blue flame
roaring loud enough to burn the words we utter in awe.
I serve at this leviathon,
a cook whose silver aluminum soup
roils in the maw of a monster
always hungry for more.
We offer a constant charge of man's detritus:
old cans, radiators, lawn chairs, engine castings
discarded shapes, the bent and broken
sinking into the melt to be made new again.
When people tour my plant, visitors, tourists of some industrial zoo,
here in their leisure to watch men at work,
"Hotter'n Hell," is what they all say.
But they're wrong.
Hell is not hot; hell is cold.
Hell is not this blistering job.
Hell is being frozen in place,
a life unchanging and unchangeable and wrong.
I tend my furnace in despair,
my frozen hell a poor counterpoint
to the infinite liquid possibilities of the metal before me.
Until I see my chance
and clamber up on the sill.
My boots smoke, and my wool coat begins to singe
before I launch myself,
not into hell,
but out of it,
thawing my heart the only way I have left.
seeking renewal and rebirth.
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