Roy Bentley

Gigantic Animated Blob of Molten Iron Longs to Be Concert Pianist

 
 
If my hypothesis about spontaneous human combustion is true and resonates within the fading rainbow of consciousness, then my having burst into flame is one consequence of being alive. It happens. You’re kicking leaves in a backyard and Poof!  I was as vague as we imagine spirits to be. Then burning. How gigantic? Well, my hat size was 7 and ¾ for starters. Under that hat brim, I was a citizen of the Republic of One. Of course, after I became molten, the fedora was fairy light.
 
Mammalians gone molten carry their dreams. This one did. When I slept—if you’d call that temperature change sleep— I felt hands shape and practice arpeggios. And the scales. In the same way, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wanted to be a blob on occasion, occasionally I wanted to be the Maestro and to spill pianissimo overtures to unimaginable conflagrations. The world, after all, is part volcano and part the noises it makes as dark turns to rock and the rock to the world by its other name.

ROY BENTLEY  is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City,  a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House), which won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. Other books include The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine), Any One Man (Bottom Dog), and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama). A new book, American Loneliness, is out from Lost Horse Press.