A man walking back to a cold empty room,
Just the barest of beds and a perpetual gloom.
Can’t bear to call it home for the term home implies
A place where a heart lives, and not where one dies.
He walked past the woods, when some shadow he spied,
A small spectre flitted, in the corner of his eye.
Determined to find this mysterious creature,
He ran through the woods, dodging branches and creepers.
On an old tree stump the being did lay,
A shadow of a child, asking only to play.
The man backed away with much haste, don’t you see,
For the child before him was none other than he.
The man knew what it was, this ethereal schemer,
The ghost of his childhood, the death of a dreamer.