TRAGIC Poem: The Boy Who Built His Coffin, by Patricia J. Dorantes

They called him King in chalk-dust court,
his throne a broken locker door,
his crown—the fear in smaller frames
that flinched before his hollow roar.

Each lunchtime feast of stolen sweets,
each nickname carved in bathroom stalls,
each tear he wrung from weaker hands
only proved the walls were walls,

and no one came to tear them down.

At home, the microwave beeped
its lonely anthem to the dark.
Mother’s perfume still haunted
the doorknob where she’d hung her coat—

now just a phantom of a scent
on jackets from the secondhand store.
Father’s voice survived in echoes:
“You’re nothing. Less than nothing. More.”

So he made something from the nothing,
built his body into threat,
learned to weaponize the silence
before it swallowed him. And yet—

The more he made them shake and scatter,
the more the mirror blurred at night,
until his face became a stranger’s,
pale and stretched and never right.

Graduation came. No pictures.
Just a name in peeling paint
on the bench where he’d held court,
now just a ghost of finger stains.

Years later, in a parking lot
behind the Walmart where he worked,
the engine running, windows sealed,
he finally faced the thing he’d birthed—

not fear, not strength, but absence,
a hollow where a boy had been.
The carbon monoxide whispered
what the silence always meant:

You built a kingdom of your hunger,
but the throne was always empty.
No one’s left to say you’re gone.
The world won’t tremble. Just the air,
just the flicker of a star
that no one noticed wasn’t there.

And when they found him (three days later),
no one claimed the body. Just
another John Doe in a file,
another turned-to-dust.

But sometimes, when the wind howls
through the schoolyard’s broken fence,
the lockers hum a hollow tune
of what was all that violence for?
And the answer comes in whispers:
Nothing. Less than nothing. More.