There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
He look’d upon the photograph of a scary-skinny model from Vogue Magazine that his mother had framed.
The child began to revere it, but the more he grew, the more weight he gained,
Until the day where he looked in the mirror, and became ashamed,
So he starved himself until he was completely drained;
Drained of energy and love, and the will to live.
The child became an adolescent in high school, and was isolated from society
For years no one loved him, and he befriended depression and anxiety
He could no longer live with reality,
And felt that he couldn't be healed through sobriety.
So he threw himself into harder drugs and consumed them silently.
A living skeleton, and abuser of drugs, he was known for his notoriety.
One day he met a girl, who saw through him and made his friendship a priority
She wasn’t so much different from him, and she loved him entirely.
The boy who was once a child became a man, and finally had love in his life,
But all around his home was painful strife;
The hatred was so real that he thought maybe he’d have more luck in the afterlife.
The woman who had ruined his life when his father remarried: the wife.
Now that he was eighteen, she kicked him out of the house, threatening him with a knife.
Living on the streets or on people’s couches, he often had nowhere to go
His homeless state made him see the world differently, although,
It wasn’t all bad. He learned about strange people and places and their flow.
Where he went he picked up culture and good things to know;
He learned the most from artists and authors, like Henry David Thoreau
The child had mostly known pain, sorrow, hunger and hate,
But going through the years in misery, or taking his own young life was no longer his fate.
Despite his despair, he had found his soul mate.
With the places and people he discovered, he felt rich, even though he could fit all his possessions in one small crate.
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.
First four lines and last two lines by Walt Whitman, taken from his poem: There Was a Child Went Forth