This poem is a little different to my others as it was co-written with my younger sister Clarice.
I've done a few collaborations before but this one's different than any other.
A few months ago I was going about my business when a thought came to me. This thought was a simple sentence that I jotted down really quick and had no idea what to do with it.
The sentence was 'I'm never coming home' .. Which left me with a very broad foundation for a poem.
After a while, ideas came flooding in. And the one that I liked the most out of all was the idea of the army. And a son leaving home to join the army. I loved the whole idea of 'never coming home' and the weight of that sentence.
I think I had a hint of a writer's block as it was really hard to motivate myself to concentrate on writing a poem at all. Clarice helped with this problem, and together we brought my idea on board and constructed a poem from it.
Something happened during the writing of the poem, though, that changed the nature of my idea.. And somehow, while changing it, it emphasised it better. When we started, I wanted to convey an image of a young man who was leaving home and, I hoped to capture his mother's reaction: the grief and the loss. But that idea got twisted in the midst of writing the poem, and it swayed more toward the soldier himself, and the question of why?
Why do people become soldiers? What could they possibly hope to achieve?
There are no direct dedications to this one, but there are many inspirations for it. I guess I'll never truly understand why, but maybe that's not such a bad thing...
The Phantom of the Darkness
He recalls one particular night,
When a phantom slithered into his infant dream,
And he awoke, alone, in a clouded darkness,
Broken only by a single hall-light beam.
With tears pouring from his little eyes,
He slipped out of bed and found his feet on the cold floor.
He made his way toward the source of the light,
Until he stood before his parents, at their bedroom door.
His mother picked him up into her loving arms,
And ran her fingers through his hair, like a comb.
As he slipped away soundly back to sleep,
She couldn't imagine her little boy ever leaving home.
In the school yard, at only ten years of ages,
He spotted his little brother
Assessing the blood drops that were falling to his feet,
And the bullies pointed and laughed with one another.
He ran as fast as he could to reach him,
With his arms widely outstretched,
Crying out his name in panic,
Until their eyes eventually met.
He set out to protect his brother through out his life,
Though, with him, he always felt alone.
I guess his brother may have taken him for granted,
As he thought he would never leave home.
In his teenage years, he met a girl,
With eyes the same colour as the oceans deep.
Her voice still echoes in the silence,
And her eyes still meet his in his sleep.
He remembers her face the day she left him.
How she told him she found his heart of gold,
But all she could see when she looked into his eyes,
Was that his life was already sold.
Although he couldn't bear the thought of losing her,
Somewhere inside he understood why she had gone.
But he loved her enough to hold onto her forever,
Even long after he had left home.
At the age of eighteen, it was time to move out.
He found himself a job, to get some money flowing.
He bought a small apartment in the centre of town.
And found a few new friends to keep himself going.
Though he did miss home, he was an adult now,
And he wished to be the best man he could be.
He kept in touch with his family and friends,
But he began to feel he could not live normally.
One night he was out with his closest friend,
When, in an instant, the place they had went to was mobbed.
And despite his attempts to protect him from the attackers,
Before his eyes, his best friend's life was robbed.
He watched as they lay his body to rest,
Into the darkness, beneath the frost.
All the light inside of him went out,
And in the darkness he got lost.
He forgot the warmth of his mother's arms.
And could no longer picture his best friend's face.
He lost his job, and went into debt,
And felt he no longer had a place.
It was then he decided to join the force,
And live the rest of his life behind a gun.
All he wanted was to be a good man,
And make up for all the harm he had ever done.
It was only in the darkness he realised,
The phantom still lingered within his soul.
It sucked out all the light he ever had in him,
And left his heart as black as coal.
He now dreams of that phantom every night,
And awakens suddenly in a cold sweat.
He steps off his bunker onto the cold floor,
And is reminded of a night he can never forget.
The night when the phantom first slithered into his infant dream,
And he was lifted into his mother's arms, out of the cold.
He remembers her soothing voice, and her fingers through his hair.
But most of all he misses her solid heart of gold.
It's then he thinks about the love of his life,
And how she had once loved his heart of gold.
And it's only then, as he takes a look around him,
He realised what she meant when she said his life was sold.
He sees now, he made a big mistake,
When he stepped into the darkness away from the light.
He could not protect his brother from the bullies,
And he lost his best friend to an attacker in that fight.
Were brought to question why he let the phantom take over,
And lead him into a life out in the unknown.
What was it that was so attractive in the darkness
That ever made him want to leave home?
29 June 2016
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