Invisible activity beneath the surface—
Paradoxical bubbling volatile mercury
of destruction and creation

To feel

Undersea, beneath the steam
An egg of magma hatches
Fossilized sizzling of life
Feeding on its layer of evaporation

A lava tube sucks another house through

What will emerge as the victor
In the war between water and fire?

Neighborhoods ravished by fire
Under Nature’s fury
Inundated with turbulent rains

The optimist survivors prevail through
the fissures of death

Merciless, treacherous

invasive forces that threaten
biodiversity can never be eradicated
despite tireless efforts

geologists walking inside an oven of 600
to bake a good of twice the degrees

burning… and gone in the time it took to read this
consuming wooden structures as if
they were toothpicks, or a house of cards.

Encapsulating, frozen in stone
the verdant twin abounds.

greenery in aftermath
a museum in a crater of past desolation
a memorial for all others lost

until the day that earth’s center empties of magma
and the structurally unsound surface
caves in on itself.