The Toad Curse And How It Perished In Flames

I can make fire breath. I learned it as a lad. My master told me I had prowess no one ever had!
I could conduct the light… I’d look away to her… She’d match my spit with spite; I don’t know what her reasons were.

I fell in love with her. My tongue is purple-black. I lit a bluish rose… She carved a curse into my back!
I dance when beauty’s near. I hop to taunts and jeers. I sought out stony glens… Lovely ladies don’t come here.

I paint the rock with flame. I burn and bruise my feet. I spit, I’m naked, ever-hungry, I forget to eat.
I stamp out flowers and I fill my ears with mud. (That way the birdsong will not stir and agitate my blood.)

I stare at ugly things. I suffer cuts and stings. It’s been a happy, hopless, curseless ten-years hermitting!

But then I smell the air and see her shrivelled there… And though my blood begins to jump and boil, I don’t despair.

The curse is breathing flames that I could never name. I ask her, shaking, quaking, why the bloody hell she came!

She does not answer me. Her eyes are withering! The wind begins to bend her… Now my muscles start to sing!

I clasp her desperately, and we jump fifty feet! I the very toad that used to hop along her street?

I fell in love with her. My tongue is purple-black. I light a bluish rose and heap the flames upon our backs…