Some say the burn is necessary
but I beg to differ.

Those rising feelings
when someone is on your mind.
Do they really mean to be there
or are they an excess of Dickens’s cheese?

Will you wake to find the burn
has melted your toasted thoughts
to reveal nothing but a corruption
of moldy imagination?

Of course there is that smile
and those eyes
that fabric touch
and the dancing soft-footed perfume
which as a whole burns holes
but really, do we need it?

That fire
consumes
resistance,
and yet …