Elegy Poem: Holy Ghosts, by Neill Hutchings

Whatever we were,
whatever particular brand of bent,
We are few and far between.

Max thought he was evil—
He prepared myself in a child’s idea of evil arts:
Violence, magic, and song.

Strange, the naïve evils we choose.

He thought we were sociopaths.

We were violent, true,
but in a sporting way.
For us, violence was a game—

Serious, but worthy fun.
Amongst worthwhile foes.

I think we didn’t understand violence.
True hateful violence.

We were numb to our deeper selves,
we could hear,
but could not translate.
Not until later.

External reference was little aid—
a limited frame of petty shuffles
and fiction.
We had no sense of the scale of it.

Like so many mad men before him,
he went to war,
to understand what it felt like
to kill a person.

It killed him.