have you always been burning?

its a legitimate question
when i saw you today
i thought
i could watch that thing forever
not even kidding
so how long
has this been going on
seriously i mean it
because if you've been sitting there since
the beginning of time for example
it raises some interesting questions of cosmology
such as what did you do before oxygen
and were you just floating in place or what
waiting for the world to exist so you
could be burning
have you always been burning
that's not a pick up line I swear
I honestly want to know
all of us are metaphors from time to time
I think my teacher said that once
it might have been a quote but i don't remember
i didn't pay a lot of attention in that class
I was too busy thinking about you burning
have you always been burning
will you be burning tomorrow
if I leave a chicken right here beside you
will it be cooked to perfection when I come back
the FDA recommends against eating
any food cooked in divine flame
as its efficacy has not been demonstrated
but as for me and my house
i'm the kind of person who takes chances
I think kids today if they saw you burning
might not even know you were burning
that's how sheltered kids are these days
from every kind of gerund
in my day there was no such thing as safety
we took our gods and our playgrounds as we found them
every playground glinted with needles and glass
if you fell on the ground that ground meant it
when you think of the first ever prayers on earth
what did they sound like
even those chimps couldn't tell the difference
or birds or whatever
between what they'd been shrieking their whole lives
and the first ever prayers
I guess you've seen or heard it all or at least
burned way up here in a corner
while it was happening somewhere else
there were always plenty of stars
if that was your thing
even the fish could look up through all that wobbly air
and think "huh"
"thats a ton of stars"
but this poem had to end somewhere
and honey so did you
he said as he dumped a quart of lukewarm water on the flames