Some men just want to watch the world burn and they’re obviously gay, as it’s clearly just so they can check out all the firefighters dispatched to hose it down. For this breed of man—incendiary in soul, conflagrant in spirit—the ordinary world is an insufferable tedium littered by colorless fodder begging for the scraps of meaning. The world doles out its Tuesdays, its minor satisfactions, and he alone can pierce the howling light within the ordinary people. This is his gift and his torment and, on the best days, his vocation.

The street’s own fool struts off that highway with the sun in his teeth and three notes trailing a busker’s guitar like a warrant. He thinks he chose me. That’s the first lie he makes, the only kind that sticks, and he tells it to himself. God, have I known them. Some men just want to watch it all go up, and I made a life of this, of them, of the delectable delusion of a man who mistakes himself for the flame. Standing there in the doorway of himself, dead sure he’s the most dangerous thing in the room.

Come in, I tell him. And he does. Lord, they always do.

He’s warm when I take him. God, they always are, built like a kiln since birth, banked up, until me, and I indulge without giving back a damn thing. Men like him talk a big game on grit and never once mention the tongues of Daddy Capital and Lady Luck twin-forking their ears so deep, they cream their boxer shorts. They just moan on and on.

A moth with no memory and no interest in one, blind to the chitin cemetery of all those who blew in on the same hot wind. I am not the same fire I was for all those names that are almost lost now, the many men who wrote me letters. I keep all of them, the letters, the molts of their empathy and discernment, the photographs and the journals full of their cramped, furious handwriting. They are various and they are irreducibly themselves, and this is the central mystery of their existence. I burn for both truths without contradiction because I am fire, and contradiction is a fate that happens to fleshly bodies that go cold.

He doesn’t know my name yet. That part is coming. That part is always coming, and I have never once had to rush it. He is beautiful. Lord, he is so beautifully ignorant. They always are. And he is coming, and I am here as I have been since before the first man looked at the night sky and decided he deserved better than those beasts among him, and I will be here long after this one fades and before he’s even gone, I am already tasting the next one, and I think—

Lord.

Lord, I do good work.