A Town Unlike Alice
BONFIRE PARTY
That plotting Catholic, Guy Fawkes, burned horribly in his flesh:
Alice has flesh and the darkness blows with the cold of a morgue,
her neck's too cold at the Protestant bonfire party.
They light a bonfire. Alice makes no social contact,
she is most fearful when most in public, her fear inhibits her.
Other people laugh. Alice fears evil and stokes the bonfire like a devil.
Soon heat blasts into her face, but the others have scattered. Alice has
to duck back as she hurls a final cardboard box,
it blazes head high and showers the party with sparks!
Alice is struck dumb by mutters, stares, complaints,
she winces with her mistake, her visible tears, but no-one helps
until Cathy comes up through the angry lull and takes her hand.
Red flame shrieks as it's torn in the wind, Cathy, unintentionally, is unkind:
“A patient of mine died yesterday, he has gone into nothing like that flame.”
Cathy is full of the subject, insistent, descriptive of the death, which proves
Alice to be in the wrong, Alice must vanish into flame.
The bonfire whistles breaths of red-gold, vanishing sparks:
“Will my flesh blister and stink when they burn me like Guy Fawkes?”