POEM: Death of The Old Kingdom
a poem by guy.named.phoenix
“The ground beneath breathes a slow, expiring sigh,
As fractured world crumble from the sky.
Inside these walls, a silent ruin grows,
A quiet war where only sorrow flows.
I trace the lines of who I used to be,
A stranger drowning in a stagnant sea,
While history bleeds upon a dying page,
And traps me in the amber of my cage.
Dark clouds gather, lightning ignites a flame,
I spit the poison of an inherited shame.
Escape the prison made of pride and rust,
That turned the kingdom into choking dust!
I hate the ghost who knelt and took the blows,
I hate the walls that closed in and imposed!
Let every altar burn, let every crown
Be ripped from phantom heights and beaten down!
Let the ruins crumble beneath a new dawn.
Between the rubble of what was... and the silence of what’s waiting
The ground opens, deep trench cuts through the misery
The old is broken and turned to memory
The old skin splits. It hurts to shed the weight.
It hurts to watch the horizon bleed.
Yet, in the marrow of the dark, a pulse begins to beat.
Out of the ashes, fire and blight,
I step beyond the shadow of the night.
The world is raw, unwritten, stretching wide,
And I am walking out the other side.
No longer bound by what the ruins claimed,
A new world—a new self—reclaimed.
The old has died; the soil turns to green,
And I awake, unbroken and unseen.
”
I originally wrote this poem about the abandoning of ones old self to become who one is meant to be, and a better version that one can be. However, this poem was also written to serve another purpose. I am planning to turn this into a song for another project I am currently on - sort of a soundtrack of it. Can’t give you details yet but the words and the cover image may give a tiny bit of clue.
I’m still working on the melody of the song and honestly and I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it is. I’m telling you, it’s much easier to cover someone else’s song. I can’t decide which key I want it to be in. I always envision the song to be an alt-rock song for a tenor. If that’s the case, I will not be able to perform this as I am a what’s classed as a “baritenor”. I have also originally made this in C minor progression but even if I want to sing a guide for someone else, I can’t. This is because I have a weak and wobbly passaggio - the transition between the chest voice to a head voice. To compensate, I have actually transpose it a whole step to D minor so I can belt the high notes. Yes, I can enter tenor’s territory. It’s the passaggio that I still need to work on.
Anyway, now I’m thinking of actually remaking it to an A minor progression so I can avoid the tricky passaggio, yet still retain the alt-rock feel I am looking for. Even then I still haven’t decided to make this song my own or get a vocalist to provide the vocal for it, just like I did with my first song “Will He Rise”, where I hired a 19-years old Swedish artist to provide the vocal for the song. In fact, that song was originally written as a power ballad at two whole steps higher but because I love his vocal so much we tuned it down to make it a whole lot mellow. I think I made the right call for that one, but for this, we’ll have to see.