Kamikaze Heart

A take on masculine burnout

He jumps in again—
but doesn’t strap.
Chest full of prideful purpose,
cockpit full of ghosts—
past missions that spoke in her voice,
smoke-shaped memories
still strapped in the rear seat.

The target’s always glowing—
her name lit like runway fire
in the back of his throat.
He dives.
Always dives headfirst.
The man who turns his ribs
into runways
for women who love
to land and leave.

Engine screaming like he did
the day he last saw his mother alive.
When she asked him, “Fly high and shine bright, my son.”
The last day his soul made a sound.
But she didn’t know
he would burn bright—
and crash.

Every time—
he hits.
Every time—
he wakes.
Someone always drags him out of the cockpit,
but the flames never extinguish.

Smoke in his lungs.
Ash in his mouth.
Body: mostly whole.
Heart: full of third degree burns.
Soul: a metaphor darker than his heart.

They pin medals on his phantom chest.
They toast his persistence.
But he knows:
he was built to burn, to explode upon impact,
not to linger
not to be mistaken for a hero.

He’s the suicide that won’t stick.
The man the fire keeps reviving.
The boy who learned love and survival
as self-destructive rituals—
crash, crawl, return.
Repeat.

One time,
aflame underneath the stratosphere (before heaven could claim him)
he pulled the pin with his teeth,
but the grenade kissed his face
and whispered:
“Not yet, lover boy.”
She called him brave.
But only because medals hung on his chest.

Still—
he limps to the launchpad again.
Still—
he sharpens his name into wings.

Because dying
would be too clean.
And surviving—
that’s the real punishment.
The tortured existence of
a man who sees himself
as a war criminal—
from the moment he learned
to love
like a battleground.

One day,
they’ll find him mid-air,
part flesh, part fuselage—
no longer flying,
no longer falling,
just orbiting—
like wreckage too stubborn to stay down.
A smoke signature saying
The flames finally caught up to me.

But if he’s not found,
it’s because even the flames
refused to cremate him—
the clouds turned their back on him—
so the sky left him to rot
in orbit.