Flame Boy

A fan from his first appearance,
smitten by his sheer flamboyance -
and his talking pet flamingos,
I believed that early issue when he knelt
beside an orange tinted Orinoco
to play with the electric eels,
saw nothing surreal when green flames licked out
from hair-line, elbows, knees and heels,
accepted that the shocks had changed
some unknown organ in his brain,
that now for ever he would be
a tinder box with in-built spark,
a walking conflagration.

I didn't think he'd gone too far
in shaking hands and squeezing out
a small inferno from his palms
to scare the baddies half to death -
with much collateral damage done.
A hero can do anything! "Top Kid!" said I.

The school play gained enormously
from Flame Boy as the dragon - though
a tad unfair on George, I thought:
he lost out for the first time ever.

And I loved it when his Nan was a hundred and some-
thing or other, and he blew all her candles
(not out, but to set them alight - not one did he miss)
though they melted and ran all over the cake - ran
better than some of these lines I should say!

Yesterday's prompt on dVerse Poets was an invitation to write on a character, real or imaginary, from a comic. Flame Boy is an invention of mine.