Fire In My Breast & Extinguish The Burning Flame Poem by Margaret Alice

1. Fire In My Breast That Burns Into My Head

Tonight I’ll cry for the very last time, having
an infallible way of dealing with pain: Never
looking back, throwing reminders far away

I never plunge a knife into my wounds, ignoring
them quite purposefully, knowing full well they
are but transient; I practiced crying long ago

About sad events before they started happening,
I’ve learnt to close the book, seldom looking back,
it’s just that there is one weak spot

That sometimes opens up, though I act quickly to
hide it again, I sometimes tread upon that place,
feel the pain return - reading words of long ago

Opens up a wound and instead of looking away,
the sweetness of the memory held me so enthralled
indulging in wild delight until the pain came back

Even though I know by now I should turn my
eyes away, forgetting the nine-year old mind,
I’m still pausing at the thought – I know

It’s forbidden to feel the magic of that time –
because it opens up a wound; soon, so very
soon, I’ll turn away and leave this memory

Of feeling so intense, of fire in my breast that
burns into my head…


2. Extinguish The Burning Flame In My Brain

Nici is reading Hilaire Belloc – some pedagogue
decided Lewis Carrol should be dethroned, yet
Belloc’s Cautionary Tales can’t compete with Alice
in Wonderland in satirical content

I’m bored with the document I brought from work,
Bulletin No.590, no fun with temperatures soaring
into the thirties, no mental activity seems possible,
got hold of an old novel for juveniles

With a heroine who specializes in being beautiful
and to top it off, a very good cook; her main attraction
her clothes from Paris; the cynical hero is even better,
an embittered phantom angry at life

To give scope for his misinterpreting every event -
that way he can fight the heroine to the end and a
brain-dead reader like me can delight in their stupidity
a scenario that only works

In a world as small as my study and shrinking still,
the best way to extinguish the burning flame
in my brain…