The Story: Soldier

The title is scratched into the paint as if the road had written it. The Soldier is not a portrait of a uniform. It is a field of fire and wire, a night city seen through a wound. The color does not settle. Neither does the man.

I run these crooked highways with my questions and my scars, dodging traps of false salvation and man's obsessions with wars. The first stanza refuses the easy altar. A scar is not a medal. A question is not a mutiny. False salvation is the trap that looks like rest. The painting keeps the highways crooked on purpose. A straight road would have been a lie.

No king, no priest, no criminal can chain what's meant to soar. So I keep searching for the love that soldiers go dying for. This is the turn that makes the work a Painted Poem and not a protest. The chain is named, and then set aside. The search is not for a flag. It is for the love that gets spent under other names. The poem does not say the love was false. It says the dying was asked to stand in for it. A man can refuse the chain and still be looking.

The surface is scored, as if every line had been walked. Gold shows through the dark the way a kept reason shows through a bad year. ELB is set low, small, after the searching, not above it.

The Soldier stands alone in the 2026 editions. It is not a fable, and it is not a doctrine of the body. Look at the scored color long enough and the lesson is plain. What was meant to soar does not need a keeper. It needs a road that has not already been named for it.

Collection:   Devine Love Eternal