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 [bad word] here.

I paint the rock with flame. I burn and [bad word] 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 [bad word] 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…