Theme
3:19am August 21, 2014

Interesting that I mentioned a deer.

Because there’s a brief deer metaphor in the one poem I wrote about my imaginary world where I would’ve had to run away and live like a hermit in the woods to avoid being institutionalized.  Understand I wrote this when I was a kid, so it’s not very good, but here it is anyway.  This is the reason that if I were Tobias I would have chosen the same route he did, if the decision to remain a hawk was deliberate:

Light gleams and she runs
Eyes of a frightened deer
Lies in her house of stone
With no other let inside
Crouching in the chaos of her mind
Face flooded in nothingness

A knock on the door
She rises and opens it
Graceful and swift
A child staring up at her
Fear on his innocent face
Turning to run away
Gently her hand stops him
Leads him inside

He speaks of the stories
The townspeople tell of her
Of an evil young woman
Crazy and dangerous
You should not approach her
One look in her eyes
They say will inform you
She dwells not in our world
But one of delusion

She bids him to look at her
Not ugly, not pretty
Sadness and confusion
Show on her face
Then smiling abruptly
She shows him her little house
With drawings and poems
She made on her own

She tells him of times
When her friends turned away from her
Her family shunned her
For something she thought
so she decided
To live in the forest
Away from people
And the problems they caused her
To forget the world
She knows she can never
Return to the town

The boy insists
That another might keep her
Her face grows cold
Tight and emotionless
Eyes growing wider
Betraying her loneliness

She runs to a corner
Shaking in terror
He touches her shoulder
And she tries to speak to him
But the sound comes out wrong
And the words are jumbled
Something about buildings
Large and triangular
Blue andsinister
And the boy backs away

LEAVE ME ALONE
She shouts unexpectedly
He runs out the door
And never returns
Now she wonders
Why she made him leave
But she is not surprised
She is always alone

Anyway… to avoid that fate, I’d have turned into a deer, or a slug, or some other forest creature, any day.

And yes I know the above isn’t good poetry, even by my amateur standards, but it gets a story across, of what I thought I was facing in life at that age, and that’s enough.  People think teenagers aren’t dealing with genuine real-life survival situations, or situations where they have to make really important decisions about where and how they are going to live.  Where they’re not sure if they have the support of their families or not.  (I did have the support of my family, but they didn’t know how to support me, they now tell me they were too uneducated on the subject to be able to know what to do at the time.  And I’ve long since accepted what happened back then as a situation where nobody knew how to do the right thing, me included.  But this sort of situation was what I feared, and tried to prepare myself for.)