I dreamed you were the ocean
and you called out my name
you said that if I joined you
we could end this worldly pain
I dreamed I was a sea shell
with the ocean trapped inside
and I called back to you
I’d swim out with the tide
I dreamed I was a dolphin
swimming in the sea
and I could feel your love
for you were part of me
I dreamed I was drowning
but didn’t seem to mind
for I was just dissolving
as you and I combined
.
all the pretty soldiers
got their death heads on
it’s a morbid culture
where we sanctify sacrifice
but sponsor its betrayal
we were only following orders
not that much has changed
it’s a different religion
but the same old excuses
we gather poppies in peacetime
to decorate the graves
of those whose lives we’ve stolen
but no-one can explain to us
just why they had to die
His name was Calum Fraser and he was seventeen, though none of us knew this at the time. The folk on the ward just referred to him as the boy who cries. Calum cried a lot – no, Calum wept a lot. You might say he was inconsolable, but I don’t remember anyone actually trying to console him. It was heart rending and it was embarrassing. So we did our best to ignore him. I thought about going to him once or twice. To put my arm around him and ask him what was wrong, but I never did. I always figured he had lost someone. You only grieve like that when you have lost someone.
Poor Calum. He wept both night and day. I know because he slept in my dorm and kept me awake with his sobbing. One night I lost the rag and told him that if he did not shut up I’d give him something to cry about. I felt instant shame. Those words shame me still. He stopped crying a few days later when he fashioned a noose from a bed sheet and hung himself in a toilet cubicle.
It must have taken a determined effort to hang himself on his knees like that. He was still kneeling in the doorway of the cubicle when I found him; the improvised noose held him upright in cruel mockery of prayer. His had been a gruesome death, a violent death, the bulging eyes and bloated tongue attested to that. I hoped to God that he’d found some peace and that death had finally dried his tears.
.
