His fingertips are doused in gasoline,
setting fire to everything he sees.
Each object he touches,
all the memories collected,
ash away and fall to crimes.
He's got eternal flames inside him,
and yet his eyes remain dimmed and submissive.
He's fragile and fractured,
and as his last heart string crackled,
you could see the hope unlit.
Fires and unsettling demons
are all he even seems to remember.
He might try and set his body ablaze,
to calmly dry off that crying pain,
sadly sticks and stones withhold his embers.
He won't die, but he can't learn,
the anguish manipulated to feed a burn.
His life was hanging in a balance of dry anger,
rather the deployment of washing hurt again,
he thought would dehydrate its annual return-