Kyle (Poetry Quarterly version)

Kyle.

Maybe his story was only half true

but he told it with such direct simple power

that momentarily the whole class went dead quiet

and through my mind washed

waves of sorrow and compassion,

a wish that over sad, complex, humanity

at least childhood could be simply joyous.

"I punched me Mum so I 'ad t' bolt.

I 'id all day in a tree. I could 'ear 'em callin' me.

No way I wuz comin' down.

Me step-dad 'ud bash me.

Then I got on a bus and come down 'ere,

to me Ma and Pa's.They're awright.

Better'n 'ome anyway."

He'd come from a long way,

big for his age, raw-boned,

a guileless, strange kind of innocent

always in conflict with older boys.

They'd veer to bump him in the corridors.

He'd mouth off at them, defiant.

He was only twelve.

Some years later I passed him in the street.

For a moment I didn't recognise him.

All that child's health had disappeared.

He was thin, very thin.

His head was studded and shaven.

His cheeks were drawn.

His eyes had that hollow, empty desolation

you sometimes see in those

who have seen too much

or known too much of human misery

and who have sought momentary respite

in a powerfully destructive vortex.

He was, I would guess, fifteen.

Finally, I read about him in the local paper.

A tide passed over me,

anguish for loss and waste,

for impotent helplessness,

for the misery of some children's lives,

for the blight that perpetuates abuse,

for those trapped in their individual torment.

He'd killed a man, a paedophile and his dealer.

Late one night he knocked on the door of a house

in a quiet sleeping street.

When the door opened he pulled the trigger

and fled into the night

whilst those in nearby houses slept peacefully on.

He was only eighteen.

I thought then of that quiet street,

of separate lives, of sleeping comfortably

in our separate houses and our separate beds

whilst young lives in agony of abandonment

flee headlong into the dark

and I heard the tolling of bells,

deep, sad notes ringing out

for every young and damaged life,

for every abused, abandoned and neglected child,

ringing out loss, waste, heartache, sorrow and pain,

bells echoing 

in desolate mournfulness 

all through this

dark

and too often

sleeping 

land.