The Burning Kite

The first collection of poems by Spencer E. Vik, known as professor_zesty on Instagram. Here are a few of the shorter poems from the book, as a sample: 'midnight oil' The time has come to burn the midnight oil For it is long past 5 and my work is not yet done Lost past 5 is the age of the world and its wallflowers Weary are the lamps who fill with light these broken, expired streets And weary am I, from working deep, deep into the night I know night now not by its color, but by its odor of apprehension and its soft and chilly whimpers of fatigue The wick inhales the oil until the wick is limp with flaming moisture The midnight oil runs out and this is when we usually tell ourselves that the world has gone to sleep But the work is never complete And so we drown in dreams Our penance for the entitlement we keep when we’ve yet to pay what we owe to the night for bestowing on us the light to sleep 'subplot' We let enough time pass to reach these unprecedented points in our lives before meeting each other in the middle of our sea of unraveled yarn We are cats sniffing each other’s pasts – purring, growling, hissing according to the weight of the air That’s what we chalk it up to when we witness a slapfight between two cats who had successfully avoided each other for years in the same apartment But we’re adults now: we know what is stewing, and now we know just how to spice it so it doesn’t bubble over But I need a quick 15 to calm down in the bathroom and deal with the heartburn Funny though how the week’s demands still haven’t ground away the longing – there it is always, crouched at the bottom of the heart in the fetal position, writhing for some sleep An adult fetus, underdeveloped from confinement to the womb for thirty years In life, we must escape the womb in order to be seen and yet we must retain an inner pinkness to be loved What we’ve come to expect is neither here nor there when it comes to the shining objects of our desire, when it comes to why we’re still here, when it comes to when it comes, when it comes 'writing in the dark' I am but a figure of reflected light writing in the dark What you see now was penned by blind hands in red-and-black candlelight Night is a reflection off the pond of empty ice Emptiness melts to emptiness and I awake to write in the dark of morning