A flash flood of worries and concerns thunder across your mind, which is suddenly feeling particularly achey for this time in the evening. Usually your brain is still in automatic mode after you crept out of your snug bed, pulled on yesterday’s already crumpled clothes, and slid down your perfectly shiny banisters, in a desperate attempt to cling onto your innocence which you briefly experienced as a child.
But now, you decide to investigate further as all ability to be rational is overridden by an intense desire to Know. Hastily you glance about you, but this demonstration of your caution serves no purpose as your brain does not register what your eyes witness.
The entry is messy. Having struck one of the wooden planks in the door, it chips and bends, although you are no closer to getting inside. A surge of curiosity enrobes your body and you grapple in the darkness before tearing away a large section of the door using only your hands, gloved against the bitter January night air.
Inside, your heart is beating with the tautness of a timpani drum, and you realise that you may be near to discovering what all the occupants of Great Elm Street have to prevent you from finding out.
Why is it that this always happens to you? No one else seems to struggle with these impossible feelings that ripple through your body every week, every day, in all hours, at the start and end of each minute God provides for you to suffer in, and without a single second passing by.
Stealing? Is that what the unshaven dirty animals living, you are sure, in the station around the corner call it? As if you would ever be normal enough to commit such a sane act. It makes you laugh. Ha, Ha, Ha. Your life was stolen from you by a masked force longer ago than you care to remember.
Still, you have a job to do. What is it you are doing here in this forbidden tomb? Oh yes. You notice a glint of icy moonlight on something In the corner. It possesses blades, as sharp as any murderer would want his weapon to be. It is a minor tool in the great complexity the government has assigned to the people who lie in their beds now, as average as anyone else. But oh, what joy, when they wake up in the morning to find their lives shattered by whatever lurks inside here and their liberator, you.
Commentary
The inspiration for this piece comes from Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, Stealing. It is about the thief in Stealing who is on one of his nightly raids, and believes he may have stumbled across a dark secret which may be, he hopes, the key to liberation from his troubled frame of mind. Written in second person, I have attempted to get right inside the character’s mind to show his paranoia. The character is also partly inspired by I am the Cheese, written by Robert Cormier, which we looked at in Year Eight.
There are a large number of similes, metaphors and questions, which have been used to show the feelings of the thief in as much detail as possible. Some of my sentences seem overly long, but this appears to be a consequence of my effort to describe as explicitly as possible the character’s emotions.
My ‘thief’ digresses and starts talking about something else, which shows his erratic state of mind.
Carol Ann Duffy wrote the poem Stealing at about the time when Margaret Thatcher was in power, as if the sort of society she had created was one where people nicked snowmen. The character feels ‘murdered’ by society – the ‘masked force’.
In the third stanza of Stealing, the thief appears to glamourise the act he is committing, as if he was in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. I hope that I have written my piece in a way that could be adapted for a dramatic monologue.
Finally, Duffy herself believes that to write a poem is an act of honesty/truthfulness, and I think my thief is baring his soul to the world, and being truthful, which is quite important as he may not usually find this easy to do due to his insecurities and paranoia.
