The Boy Who Discovered Fire Poem by James McLain

The boy is now all but gone but now how grown?
Twisted in knots how my body hurts
never as bad as it did, how they knew it then.
Still inside this brain it sleeps with such pain
all ways terrified like it was back then,
now afraid it's being corrected again.

But how..by whom...me I am still inside.
Terrified of drugs and alcohol, will I be
scooped out and made hollow and
placed in that room so dark I can't swallow.
Always careful of that line between fantasy
and where it is I must go to simply survive.

Threatened with one bridge after the other.
How the concrete sucks out all my warmth.

Dare I go back to when I was five and I tried
to make them breakfast
in bed
I knew nothing of Tiffany back then, wide eyes.
Some childs bold attempt at independence.
How the piss ran down my legs as it was easy
much to easy
to force open my hand
and burn my finger with that Zippo untill it blistered.
It was me against the world after that and the world
never knew:
what I lost or the cost to toast two pieces of bread.
I was a difficult child I know and perhaps too precocious