Have you ever watched a candle burn?
Flicker, fade, wasting away
The wicker waxes and wanes in pain
All consuming and never full
Unsatisfied with life so dull
It grows and builds and strikes and screams
It roars and eats and tears at your seams
You want to let it out but it never quite seems
Like you can.

We live in a world today
Where people's candles melt away
They drip and drop and slowly fall
A silent plop, heard by all
But acknowledged by none
For they have their own flames to deal with.

I was reading the news the other day
And, apparently, there's this new invention
A mental confection
At some grad school somewhere
That's still in the works
From minds of the same inflection
That uses sound waves to
Extinguish
Fire.

Prototypes,
The device and young minds alike.
Relatively unheard of, at the time,
But they may one day save countless lives.

An interesting thought, that sound overcomes
That an amplifier may dampen
Sound inside our hearts
The burning flame that rips apart.
But fire consumes the air itself
And what sound do you make when you cannot breathe?
You open your mouth and you can only seethe
The fire consumes and grows in height
And try as you can with all your might
To make a sound, some drowning noise
The fire devours, ignores and toys
With you.

Our lives are filled with sound.
Why is it then that all around
People fall and fires fade
And candles wax and slowly wane
We burn alive from inside out?
Can this be stopped with just a shout?
A cry for help, a strangled plea
"Please, just listen to me!"
But our lives are filled with sound;
Fires burning, melting down-

Until we learn to hear the truth
Ignore the flames and blow the roof
Off our little hearth, and open wide
Expand our limits, let the flame inside
Perish away and finally breathe
Free from the fires that forced us to seethe-

A prototype, that's all it is.
Relatively unheard of.