Poetry

A Man Walks a Lonely Road

A man walks.

Walks along a lonely road,

the road to take a life,

a life that he knows,

or a life he doesn’tknow.

What does a man know?

Does a man know what road he walks on?

On a road he does not decide to walk down,

but down he walks until the end of his hourglass,

the hourglass that tracks his life of recklessness,

recklessness of his choices,

the choice of a road to take a life.

The lives that he now carries.

Carries in the name of all his sins,

Sins that scar him on his way down the road.

The road ofloneliness,

loneliness because of the responsibility of dealing with killing another.

Another’s lifethat he can never give back,

back to the family and the friends of that soul.

The soul that’s gone forever because he pulled a simple trigger!

The trigger that helped him begin this road,

the road of a lonely man.

A man that felt bad for the death of the ones he now carries.

Carries because he was the same as their lives, he was the same!

Same, but different.

Different in the eyes of this man,

the man who couldn’t stand himself.

Himself being a murderer and taking another’s life.

The life of a soldier,

a soldier who has now been left behind.

Behind by the others he didn’t see,

see walking next to him on the same road,

to the bitter end of his road.

The road he will never walk again.

 Joshua Riding

I made this poem because I wanted to try and betray what I thought a soldier felt. Felt like walking a road that he owns, but he isn’t deciding where he goes and what turns he makes. He is lonely because he feels like there is no one that understands him how it feels to kill someone. He doesn’t know how to live with killing someone else because he wasn’t told how too he was only given a gun and trained with a gun and how to take a life.

           

The inspiration I got for this poem came from a book called “All Quiet on the Western Front” where in the end the main character Paul was happy to die because he had nothing to go back to. He had lost his friends being casualties of war and his mom and dad were left. There was no reason to go back because he had created such a big connection to his friends that they were his family now. That’s all he cared about that’s all he remembered that was what he wanted to protect and that’s what he couldn’t do.

I had an inspiration from Shakespeare because I loved the way that he made things have a nice rhythm but is able to connect it to things that you wouldn’t think about. But, I liked the rhythm the most so I tried to make it feel like it rhymes by incorporating the last word of every sentence into the next line. The feeling it gives off is it could be different or the same like Shakespeare and have different meanings.

What I will do at the exhibition is memorize my poem because I feel like memorizing it I can emphasize the words more and get my words time and said in the way I want to better. The way that I can use hand motions feels like it would help my poem better than pictures can. I feel like hand motions are more familiar than pictures of just a road and a grave stone. But, also I memorize it because it should be talked to the people through a person instead of a screen.

Watch my poem Here