When the Shadows Shift

When the Shadows Shift:
The World in my Eyes
chronicled in a series of poems and short tales.


         The world is unpredictable and cruel, beautiful and loving, the world is an ever shifting globe of chaos where one might feel love and another might seek revenge for the same touch, for the same comment, for the same reason.  These are the truths I have come to know in my short time among the people I have met.  I will share these truths with any who will care to listen, so I have compiled them here for all to read, my secrets, my hopes, my dreams, and my greatest tragedies all lie within, so take care how you interpret my words and always follow this rule:  “A poem or story is the door to a persons soul, if you can truly analyze and understand the verses of a haiku, a narrative, or a few simple lines of free verse; you, for a short time, can see the world through the writers eyes and live a part of their life as they have lived it.”

         One can always tell when a poem is false, when the words come from analyzed thinking, rhyme scheme and meter and what the reader might want to hear, and one can always tell when the words are truly felt and expressed and lived by the writer, when the words flow from the undeniable truths of the heart.  Within my compilation you might find a poem or more than one poem to be untrue, unfelt by my heart, unlived by my soul.  I promise, though, that all poems here were included for a reason and most of them are truly how I felt at the time of their writing; this is my life given to you for examination and speculation in a series of poems and short tales I have written over the years. As I write this, the first four poems of this series are complete, I have finished no chapter-length stories, though I have a few short stories, I am seventeen years of age and it is the year 2007.

         I will be looking back to describe my writings, I am unsure how many more entries will be made, there may be none, there may be hundreds, only time will tell.  I will do as I have with these first few, chronicle them in order of their completion.  I will also include from now on a date on the works themselves as to when they were finished, the first few are estimated. 

Welcome to the life of Matthew Harper (AKA: The Dark One).