The Glowing Man

Lowered in a Pyrex chamber

Candid and bare,

As if to invite astute observation

Of the volunteer, replete with amorphous doubt,

Who stares at the key to his own enthalpic

/entropic,

/total

annihilation.

His quivering restraints are pierced with a snap of sharp exhalation.

With a thunderous palm

The button is thwarted of all hesitation

And the volunteer awaits his slow sublimation.

All breath flees the glass theatre;

The scentless burn of auto-fluorescing flesh

Is most illuminating.

The volunteer immolates through spectacular prismatic hues;

From the deepest dusk red

To inevitable violet-blues.

The glow emits from dermis to marrow,

Patiently combing through the fibres and splintering junctions

Of tangled cables and portly striations, fraying to the expanding void.

Nature, it seems, will take its time

When asked to regress and undress a man of his pride.

Somewhere between yellow and green,

The volunteer trusts that, somewhere, within his trepidation,

The merciful quench of a gentle caress

May yet show him another way out of this spectral mess.

Yet, as the hysterical plumes of kindling matter

Sequence from teal to royal blue,

No eye can witness the withering flares

Of the pastel violet flower that sputters from view.

The evaporating man;

The atomising man;

The now-erased man;

Condensed to the vibrations of a microwave hum,

The last noise ironed to a soundless vector

That empties into the thermal sink

Of a surely man-made abyss.