Family, forgiveness and the lies people tell.
The Poet knows full well what he is. Doctor Carmichael’s talked about stress, panic, the caustic afterburn of fear and regret. It’s just he doesn’t know why he’s like this. His mother says he’s always been a ‘quiet, thoughtful child’. His step-father thinks it might be ‘a teenage thing’. His brother likes to say he’s ‘careful’ while his sister tends to plump for the blunter, if undeniably more accurate, ‘weird’.
He is weird. Literally so. He was an unusual baby; an easy baby but unusual all the same. He never cried. Not once. Or so the story goes. He just ate and slept and watched, content to allow life to pass him by. He was, according to reverentially recollected family lore, very nearly three before he said his first word. His mother seems to think it was ‘tractor’, although he finds this hard to believe.
He’s always felt different, detached from the world around him, a foreign face in an alien land. Not that he’s complaining. It’s not an unpleasant feeling. In fact, it’s barely a feeling at all.
And then he goes and spoils it all by writing that stupid, bloody poem...