Where the Fire Keeps Burning
there’s a storm that never learned restraint —
it lives behind my eyes,
curls in the folds of thought
like thunder waiting for breath.
my mind
wants to order the ruin,
make sense of the wildfire
as if naming it
could quiet the burn.
but the heart —
the heart only knows direction,
not reason.
it follows the pull
like rivers follow gravity,
no questions,
only motion.
and she —
no name spoken,
yet written into every silence
i can’t escape —
she’s there
in the spaces between arguments,
in the flicker of every closing door
i refuse to lock.
i don’t question this.
never have.
there are truths too deep
for logic to erode,
too rooted to be pulled
by time or distance.
this is one of them.
i know what fire tastes like.
i know what she is
by how the wind sounds different
when she’s not here.
i know because the heart
doesn’t wonder.
it remembers.
it aches without uncertainty,
bleeds without doubt,
and still opens —
every time.
the mind calls it madness.
the soul calls it home.
and me?
i call it
the only thing
i’ve ever been sure of
in a world
that keeps trying
to convince me otherwise.
Scott Burton is a writer and artist from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, whose work is rooted in
raw honesty, emotional survival, and the haunting beauty of what lingers long after love or loss.
A dreamer by nature and a romantic to a fault, his poetry spans decades and carries the weight of
lived experience… Thousands of pieces that speak what couldn’t be said out loud. His writing
walks the tightrope between ruin and reverence, reaching into themes of longing, emotional
vulnerability, missed chances, and the ache of memory. He writes in free verse, often in a stream-
of-consciousness style, allowing the poem to breathe and break as a heart does — unpolished,
unguarded, and always reaching.
Scott is the author of Forever is Tomorrow, a deeply personal collection revisited in a newly
expanded edition, and the currently releasing ten-volume Chaos series, which chronicles the
emotional anatomy of being human. His work isn't interested in perfection — it’s about truth,
even when that truth hurts. His ongoing creative identity also lives under the moniker
ks.bleeds.ink, where art and vulnerability continue to meet on the page. His writing remains a
kind of devotion — to love, to memory, to all that lingers after the moment has passed but
refuses to let go.
