There is a place behind the hospital,
beyond the pauper's graves and wrought-iron fence,
that saw the suicide of Donnagle,
and every night for years has seen it since.
Who knows how he slipped out, got away clean,
eluded nurses, searchlights, and barbed wire,
lugging his can of stolen gasoline,
and, calm as bishops, set himself on fire.
And so it's been for fifty years or more,
behind abandoned rooms and rusted gates:
at midnight, spectral flames begin to roar
and that poor madman screams, and dissipates.
Some say a doctor was involved somehow;
but anyway, it doesn't matter now.