o
The cold crept in, a primal, ancient sting,
He knew the law that survival had to bring:
To fight the frost, to keep the dark at bay,
A fire must be kindled, come what may.
The world was hushed, a circle cut from snow,
Ringed by the black of trees in silent row.
A vacant, empty white beneath the night,
A canvas waiting for the fire’s bite.
His every breath, a cloud of fragile ice,
A perfect stillness, void of any price.
The air itself, a sharp and brittle glass,
That held the world in one cold, perfect mass.
But hunger gnawed, a need that matched the frost,
He could not let this precious fire be lost.
He gathered wood, whatever he could find,
A duty bound in body and in mind.
He piled it on, the damp and poison root,
The resin-thick, the strangely bitter fruit.
He did not know the fuel he chose to burn,
He had a simple lesson yet to learn.
The fire turned. It ceased to be a friend,
A smoldering edge he could not comprehend.
It licked the ground… A spark.
A searing pulse.
He flinched… but fed the flame.
He fed it still, for hunger screamed aloud,
He bowed his head, in smoke and ash enshrouded.
The embers caught the fabric at his groin,
He cried in pain, but still he could not flee.
For life, he thought, demanded this of him.
He stacked it high, upon the flickering rim.
The flames lashed up, a seething, toxic grace,
And scarred the folds, that hidden, secret place.
A living torch, a ritual of despair,
He burned alive, gasping at the air.
A sacrifice, unwitting, blind, and slow,
To flames he trusted, flames he helped to grow.
But fade the scene. There is no frozen wood.
It is a body, misunderstood.
The fire’s not a thing of spark and heat,
It is the food, the poison, and the sweet.
The poison root, the damp and resin-thick,
That made the gut, the blood, the system sick.
The duty was the meal he had to eat,
The source of life, the catalyst of defeat.
This was the pact, the tragic, unseen cost:
To stay alive, his living must be lost.
The very food that held the cold at bay,
Gave nourishment to his own, slow decay.
The doctors came and watched the burning man,
And offered gauze to fit their symptom-plan.
They cooled the burn, they analyzed the ash,
But never questioned what had caused the flash.
They handed him the wood and called it care,
And chiseled chronic on his deep despair.
A blindness held, where truth could not take root,
The casual, tragic turning of the boot.
He had to eat to keep his heart alive.
He had to burn just so he could survive.
When life itself becomes the funeral pyre,
How does one stop from feeding his own fire?
o