I started writing at the ripe old age of fourteen when the Lord decided to call my brother, Tommy, Home. I was about to enter the eighth grade when my whole life was turned upside down. At the age of fourteen when most teenagers were testing their manhood and vying for the attention of the young girls, I was searching for my identity. I was more than just your typical little brother. I was a clone of Tommy. I didn’t want to be like my brother, I wanted to be Tommy. When the Lord commissioned Tommy into the Palace of the Saved, I felt demoted to the house of the damned. One of the first poems that I wrote, after the death of my brother, summed up the life in which I was doomed to live out.

A Little Man

I am just a little man,

Who likes to sit and worry,

My mind is working in a trance,

And I’m always in a hurry,

I am just a little man,

Who walks the streets at night,

I’m always thinking of romance,

Or trying to start a fight,

I am just a little man,

Who’s searching for a goal,

But I’ve been searching all my life,

And still there’s no place I can go,

I am just a little man,

Who curses, cheats and lies,

I am no good on this land,

And Hell- Bound If I Die.

I began to question the purpose of my whole existence without my brother. I had never felt so alone in my life. The eighth grade was like a pipe draining whatever contents it held into an airless atmosphere, suffocating the very being of the person born Steven Eugene Miller. This first set of poems along with the one written above are poems written while in the eighth grade. They delve into the mind of a very lost and confused little man searching for a small corner in which to lay his soul.