They say that if you toss a salamander into flame
that it will crawl out smoking cool.
And I am talking cooler-than-Joe-Camel-cool.
Joe Camel wishes in his wildest
that he looked that cool while smoking.
Pores like tea-pots,
little wisps spurting from each tiny ember
red hell hole.

What a trick.
Animation is a trick--
Gravity is a trick--
The proton-proton chain is trick that runs our tricky sun--
Fins are tricks and seeds and sperm and guns
and eyes and maybe planes and definitely words.

I like to think that the greatest tricks are those
that inspire duplication--
The kind that require some very poor life decisions to be made.
That would be a neat trick, we might say,
if we could bash some protons together
and blow up some enormous shit.
We would be at least as cool as the sun.

Of course, we can't quite pull that trick,
and so must settle for exploding an atom with a neutron,
a city with an atom and so on,
still claiming that was a pretty neat trick.
We are nearly as cool as the sun.

Everyone would probably have to agree with that.
Even God might nod and say, Jesus, I really didn't see that coming.
They're getting cooler all the time.
Of course, God is just being nice. He's just saying that.
I mean, His trick is obviously much more cool--
He dropped all his tricks in flame,
and they each crawled out smoking.