With his eyes glazed over,
face caught in a blank stare,
nobody could know the events about to follow.

An intelligent child,
funny, popular, and full of energy.
His future looked bright,
the world his for the taking.

Somewhere in his late teen years,
it all started to go wrong.
First came trouble in school,
followed by wild reckless behavior.
He started having problems at home,
his parents did not understand,
and all the warning signs were misread.

By the age of seventeen
he struck out to make it on his own.
Trouble followed everywhere he went.

Finally at nineteen, he crossed the line.
Now the law got involved,
not once, not twice, but many times.
Trouble had led to crime.

A car stereo was first,
then shoplifting and drinking,
last came the vagrancy.

He could not keep a job,
and never had honest money to speak of.
Slowly his friendships all changed,
he grew distant to family and loved ones.
Years went by without a trace,
no letters ever written,
not even a phone call.

The one night out of the blue,
a phone rings at around three a.m.
A woman answers,
hearing a young man in his late twenties sobbing,
the caller, begins speaking.

He tells the woman about his troubles,
and how they all came about.
Years of drug addiction had led him here,
at around fifteen it started with experimenting.

Now it all seemed to make sense,
why this beautiful, sweet little boy
just self destructed.
The young mans mother,
who had answered the phone,
was now weeping uncontrolably.

They talked for hours,
and agreed he needed help.
He was willing to get it,
and she wanted to do whatever she could
to get it for him.
A day and time was set to meet,
she told him how much she loved him,
and they hung up.

Unknown and unclear,
exactly what happened after he hung up.
His desperate plea,
a cry in the night for someone to save him,
was answered by the lady who had given birth to him.
The day and time set, too far away,
or maybe the guilt, shame,
and despair was too much to face.

In the blink of an eye,
reaching for his hand, it was too late.

At a phone booth on a street corner,
he pulled a gun, then the trigger.
In the flash that followed,
every mistake except for his last,
was erased.

01/25/2003

Author's Note: Somethings never leave you. They haunt you till you die.

Posted on 01/27/2003
Copyright © 2024 Adrian Calhoun