Being a writer is like having a fire inside your body,
burning through your veins, through your fingertips
it is the swelling of belly,
the breaking out of sweat on the temple,
the fire causing tremors and stomach aches and broken hearts,
you try to douse it with writing prompts and grammar
and the sweet taste of whispers with friends who don’t quite understand
your old spirit.

The only action to blow out those consuming flames before they engulf you
is to feed them.
To swallow other poems, other books, other works, like gasoline
like alcohol that alights you with just a touch of a sting.
To eat up conversations and stories so that you feel worldly and worthy
so that it has significance.
To spit out fireballs on to paper,
to use those invisible henna flames on our fingers to type, to write
this poetic, storytelling fire burns out logical thought in our minds,
we think in rhyme, in the emotion, in the red trails of logic
and the burnt ends of ignorance.

They try to put out our flames in middle school English classes
and with family who want to tame you
want to fill you with the extinguisher of self-doubt,
telling you cannot succeed,
and they’d let you wither in the absence of words that actually have substance.
We prevent ourselves from being burnt alive from the inside out by breaking our skin
and letting flames devour our paper and our screens,
molding prose and poetry, from the blaze like lava forms new rock.

We are writers, our souls are flames and our hands are torches.
Our minds are infernos and our hearts pump kerosene.
We transfer our burning word onto paper and press,
and we set them out into the world at times, so that maybe others will feel
a hint of the heat.
So that maybe our words will ignite the wick hidden inside
and spark a small fire inside someone.
We do it so that maybe our ashes and still lit coals
Will be warm embers of knowledge and solace
that can be gathered into virgin hands and be placed through the stomach into the soul
to be kept for safe keeping for those that are lonely and lost.
Perhaps the smoke will beckon others, so that maybe the scarred skin and
third degrees on the mind will be worth it.
What if we give up our secrets, the parts of ourselves that are like the blue flame,
burning the hottest, what if we give into the flame
and maybe we can help the boy with the writer’s block and the father who
tells him to get a real profession.
Open the eyes of the man with the wood in his soul,
stunting his growth and making him hard as oak.
Save the girl whose spark makes her world a little darker.
We can be the example,
Set the ignorance on fire,
Tell our stories,
And let our words become the match
That sets the world alight.