Walking on Lava

Not the hot kind, although here
That kind is all around,
But the riddled pumice
Which grounds my sandals,
A’a pitted, gouged, and fissured
By the searing roil and heave
Beneath the planet’s molten stir,
Chiseled with the filigree,
The volcanic tongues,
The cursive of the tuffs
That bleed up from the lungs
Of hell, but here, underfoot,
Underneath the coconuts,
Slough softer than the concrete
Slabs to which our pocked
And dimpled loggia leads:
No difference, you’d think,
Between the prefab porphyries,
The cysts and flux of ancient plumes,
Except you feel the seeds,
The heat of fumes
Which the burning earth
Still breeds. So long after its flow,
Its moment, its quartz and mica
Silicates still speed the feet
With memories of what the slew
Once was, the beat and scald
Of sun exploded in the soil,
A swelling sense of space
Still slurried, of solar storms
Seething through the land,
Igneous cores that warm
Us still, islands being after all half sand,
As if a galactic ocean bore us
On a funeral pyre through
Porous runnels of rust and flame,
Sieves born in fire,
Where the real portal
Of the mainframe lives.

February 24th–28th, 2026, Kaiholu