'Set Yourself On Fire'

1.

There was a day when I was outdoors and the gardener called for me; to show me the body of a decapitated snake. Camouflage had not worked in its favor. He was trimming the hedges beside the mail box when he found the body still in shock, struggling. The head, was never found.

2.

Sometimes I am slinking away in my dreams of the garden and house. These are times when dream-snakes of countless varieties invade, and usually alone, I am as though making my way through an extremely cluttered or narrow museum, ever watchful of each and every snake I encounter, as if any one of them could mean my death. I wander aimlessly along these paths drenched in neurosis, until I am awake in cold sweat, fear. Thankfully, snakes never follow me out into the waking world, unlike, (once) the dream of splinters.

3.

We set fire to the grass clippings and garbage that we had gathered under a young coconut palm. Slowly, as the flames caught on, a body began to form from it, coiling itself around the palm from the base, climbing skywards as carbon trailed in its wake. We watched it all burn--burn! burn! burn!--and returned indoors when it began to snow ash.

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