How Does One Write?

Take a look out of your window. what do you see?
Nothing; thick material blinds my view.

Look around your room. What is it like?
Cluttered. Piles of the inconsequential. I can't write.

Turn the radio on. Does that help?
No; hearing whining won't help.

Get a pad. Let the pen fly. See where it lands.
If I have a block, then what's the point in that?

Ok. Pick up the phone. Chat to a friend.
Their words drift. Problems they want me to mend.

Take a look inside yourself, anything there?
I see muscles contracting.
Veins stringing everything together.
Mainly, a skeleton and
it holds me up.

You see? That's it, that's writing. Now,
What is your biggest problem?
If I pretend. then writing is.
But I know
my ind is so full.
The only way to get rid
is to write. Page by page.

My only problem,
is me.

Barrage

Barrage

I finished with the dead man and placed him on top of the pile of other decomposing bodies. The stench hit my nose like a bullet hits the bone your brain is encased in. It smashes straight through to the sensitive area.

“BARRAGE!” I heard the General shout.

He took my arm away from the rotting corpses and pushed me out of the way. He landed on top of my chest but stayed there as a spraying of mud and shrapnel flew over our heads. I stayed as still as I possibly could, focusing on my breathing and heart rate. My heart was hammering against my ribs nineteen to the dozen but so was the General’s. If he was scared, his face didn’t show it.

A short while later the barrage had stopped and the General scrambled to get off of me. I lay there in utter shock. The General brushed himself down and helped me up just as the C.O came over.

“General Jovanka there you are. Oh and Private Smith too. Good we need both of you to assist in the clear up. There’s a preliminary barrage to your right. You were both lucky to have missed it,” The C.O said.

“Should we examine the damage?” General Jovanka asked.

“Yes. This way,” The C.O said.

I helped over the next few days by clearing bucket after bucket of watery mud. The waterlogged trench has a lot of downfalls. In the mud you had to be careful not to shrapnel from shells. You also had to be tough for parts of dead bodies were everywhere. There was an arm here and a string of brain there.

On my final day of clearing the damage, I found something no one should ever see. In the mud I saw my friend, Mark. I’d been worried about him for days. He did not come home the day of the barrage and I had started to fear the worst. It was true.

Half of his body had already been decomposed by the looks of it. Flesh had been ripped away from the bones like what you would see after someone had carved a chicken. Claret blood poisoned the ground below and flies nestled on his yellowing bones and matted hair on his head. His eyes had been gouged out and his lips were slightly ajar. The ghost of his last scream echoed on his lips. Suddenly his mouth opened fully with a crack of bones and out came a brown rat. It aimed its jump directly at me. I screamed and ran backwards. Those vermin send shivers down my spine. That was the start of my shell shock.

I became an insomniac for the first time in my life. Dark rings of pure irritation circled my eyes. The slightest things irked me and the slightest things made me want to cower. Those God damn rats will be the death of me. They scamper over us as we shine our boots or over our faces as we are dozing off at night. We chuck our food cans over the top and at night we hear the rattle rattle tap of the rats rolling about in them. When I close my eyes I see the rat flying towards me. I see poor Mark. I see the rat. It’s always the rat. Footsteps in the distance make me want to recoil into my dugout further and further.

“Last night some of our troops were taken by enemy lines. We are to retrieve them,” The General informed us.

I lay in my dugout listening. A brown rat came scampering towards me and my bayonet and bolster training came back to me. I picked my bayonet up and stabbed the rat when it got close enough.

“Where’s Smith?” General Jovanka asked.

“Sir I don’t think he should go today. He’s not himself. He’s: irritable, tired and scared. I can’t describe it, Sir,”             Tom defended.

“Shell shock… Smith, get out here!” He shouted but I refused; going would mean my death.

“Come one Keith, please?” Tom pleaded.

He was scared he was going to lose a friend. The first friend he made in Étaples training camp and the last one by his side. A hand yanked me out of my dugout and forced me into a standing position. I looked down at my shoes and another rat came by, black this time, but the visions came back. I screamed and threw myself to the mud. Bury me like you buried Mark! Come on Germans I beg of you! Do it! I don’t get burying; I get yanked up again.

“He seems alright,” The General said.

“You’re kidding right?”

“His disposition is towards rats not guns, therefore he will go today,”

They’re not listening. What can I do to make him listen, to show him that I am not alright? It came to me and I did it without a second thought. My mind was so screwed that I basically did anything without a second thought. In the end it was the General holding his jaw and glaring at me.

“Keith!” Tom yelled.

“Smith! Right, that’s it. I’ve got no choice. He’s a coward,” General Jovanka said.

“Please Sir, don’t,” Tom begged.

General Jovanka didn’t listen. He led me to an area where there were plenty of gun shots in the wall of mud where the firing squad had had target practise before.

“The C.O isn’t here today, Smith; he’s in rest camp,” General Jovanka informed me and I nodded.

I moved towards the mud wall after a short push from the General. I looked up to see Tom pleading with the General and General Jovank loading his rifle.

“He’s a coward, Maxse. I’ve got no – no – no choice,” He stuttered.

“You don’t want to do this so why are you?”

“It’s my job,” He said simply and shot.

I fell to the ground just as I realised something: those rats were the death of me. 

Falling

Falling:

The room is still with an eerie sense of darkness to it. The moon outside illuminates one corner of the room. The corner where I am crouched.

Why am I here? Why is the moon spotlighting me and my existence? What does this light want with me?

Then the answer came to me. Light exposes beauty. Of course it does. Light also exposes ruins. It seeps into the cracks of one's soul and tries to shine light into the dark depths of the cracks. This silver moonlight is trying to make me a better person. It won't get very far that's for sure. The cracks in my soul are far too deep for any light to penetrate.

It still doesn't answer my question of why am I here though. Why I am not snuggled up under the thick layers of my duvet, where no harm could get to me. Why am I cocooned in layers of my own self? Why am I out in the open where everyone, including the moon, can see me? The light filtering through my curtains can see me. All of me. It doesn't like what it sees. I wouldn't blame it either; I don't like what I see every time I look in the mirror.

The question that is bugging me the most is: why am I here alone? Why is no one with me? I have nothing here apart from this moon-lit spotlight that's created a small circle around me.

The white walls of the room surround me, making the room feel smaller and smaller and smaller by the second. Darkness can suffocate you but so can something pure. The dark is dangerous but purity can also make you suffer. Someone pure can strangle you just as much as slithers of darkness can.

I balance on the tips of my toes. My sanity and balance teeter on the edge. A small gust of wind has the possibility to cause me to tumble over and fall.

The scene changes around me. I smell the sea and the cold air makes my blood run cold. Blocks of ice replace my arteries. I am still balanced on my tip toes. There is nothing in front of me and nothing behind me. I am stuck in the perfect ultimatum and I can only move along the ledge until it stops. Until I stop.

I need to go forward in my life. I need to get somewhere and become the person that my parents want me to be an not the person they despise. However I am so focused on going forward that I don't realise the massive gust of wind blowing me backwards. Backwards off the ledge and falling.

Falling.

Falling.

Falling backwards.

Truce

Truce:

Christmas Eve 1914:

It won’t be over by Christmas. That much is clear. We shall not be sipping that fine wine that Wilfred was always talking about. We shall not be with our families, having a jolly good time. Instead, we shall be here. In a waterlogged trench, smelling like a latrine and sleeping in our dugouts. We will be given some duckboard for a mattress and a sandbag for a pillow if we are lucky.

If anything annoys me, it’s those pesky rats. The black ones are just frightfully prodigious and formidable; it’s the brown ones you have to watch out for. The man eating rats. They’re all over the place; you can’t seem to get rid of them. Don’t even get me started on the body lice.

Or even the smell. Don’t get me started on that either. I guess when you have bodies piled up on the side of the trench it will let off the most pungent smell. They were in the shallow ditches, piled up in the reserve trenches and down the path to Communications, but no more so than on the front lines. Latrines overflowed, sending the belongings of a toilet into the trench. It’s God awful.

I was rubbing my hands together and blowing on them, trying to get a bit of heat into my flesh if that was possible. Then, throughout the camp we heard singing. They were notes that drifted from not so far away but seemed so distant.

“Stille Natche…”

Wilfred and I stuck our heads out of the dugouts and listened, as were the rest of the soldiers. We were immersed in the notes that seemed so familiar.

“Silent Night,” I whispered.

“You speak German?” Wilfred asked.

“No, just listen to the tune,”

We listened and it was so. They were indeed singing Silent Night. In other words, they were calling for a truce. I sat up fully and cleared my throat. Wilfred caught on and gave me a look that said ‘You can’t be serious!?’ but oh boy was I serious.

“Silent night, holy night…” I sang loudly.

Wilfred slowly joined in and after a while, so did the rest of the British army. The singing of the Germans got louder when they heard our singing. No one slept that silent night.

Christmas Day 1914:

“What happened last night was a one off and it won’t be happening again, I can be sure of that. Gentlemen, need I remind you that this is war?” The General asked.

Wilfred raised an eyebrow at me and I turned away. We shall see about that; they were calling for a truce I can feel it in the air. No one wants to shoot at each other. It’s Christmas Day. The day Christ was born and brought into our world. Shouldn’t we show him a little respect by calling a truce on such a day?

I stepped onto the fire bay and stuck my head over the parapet. A bullet from a German sniper soared over my head and a hand yanked at my clothes on my back, forcing me down and out of sight.

“Never in my dreams! Power, you’re weak, are you completely insane? Do not pull a stunt like that ever again!” The General shouted.

He roughly let go of my military coat and turned his back on me. No. I know I’m right about this. Once again I poked my head over the parapet, but this time I brought my hands up into surrender.

“Power! You idiot!” The General roared.

Nothing happened. No bullets. No shells. No shrapnel. No grenades. No nothing.

“Forgive me for saying, General, but they appear to not be shooting my head off!” I yelled backwards.

“Don’t you dare get out of the trench!” was his response.

In answer, I flung myself out of the trench and walked into No Man‘s Land where I saw a German soldier advancing too. I will worry about the consequences of my actions later.

“I am actually going to kill that boy!” The General roared as I left.

The German and I stopped in the middle of No Man’s Land and looked at each other for a while. The German stuck out his hand. His armlet was the same as mine. He was a private.

“Ich heiβe Adolf,“ He said.

I shook his hand.

“My name is Daniel,“ I said.

June 1990:

The gentleman I was talking to leant back in his chair and stopped writing. He frowned slightly and then looked up to look at me.

So it’s true... The football on No Man’s Land?“ He asked.

“All true,“

“Who won?“

I leant forward in my chair, curiosity was dragging me forward.

“Who do you think won?“ I asked.

“Britain?“ He asked.

“You’d like to think so but with our track record of football skills then you can safely say that the Germans won that game. So you can put that into your book too,“ I said and he wrote my words down.

Christmas Day 1914:

The General marched to my dugout and ordered me to stand and I did just that. I knew there would be repercussions for what I did. I may have caused a truce but I still disobeyed my General’s most explicit orders. It was punishable by death or Field Punishment One.

“Under normal circumstances I would have placed you in the way of a firing squad and had done with you, but what you did today only caused one man to die and there could have been thousands,” The General said.

My eyes widened with shock. I took all the risks. Not one single soldier, British or German, should have died today.

“Who was it?” I croaked.

“Frank Collins. He was walking up to a German fella and when he turned his back on the German troop, he shot him in the back. The stretcher bearers tried reaching the poor bloke, but couldn’t in time. However, more would have died if you hadn’t taken the risks that you did today, Power. So, although I am going to pretend it never happened, you did well,” The General said.

He refused to believe that a truce was possible. He refused.

Voice

Voice:

I cannot speak. No,
actually that's a lie.
I know how to speak.
But I choose not to open up
Hurt and pain. Elected mute.

I Fall Down

I Fall Down.

I fall down.
Separation stabs the heart.
No remembrance.
All is forgotten.

Separation stabs the heart.
Where's the strength if you break?
All is forgotten.
You can't swim if you drown.

Where's the strength if you break?
No remembrance.
You can't swim if you drown.
I fall down.

Love

Love:

Love.
Nothing,
I know of.
Can you help me?
I want to learn how to love. I'm afraid.