Prologue
I welcome you, reader, into this book’s lands,
With hopes that you have but the steadiest hands.
Prepare yourself quickly for what you shall read,
Should you now continue where this tale does lead.
Tho’ peaceful these words do so rest on their page,
Be warned, they shall all your emotions engage.
Their meaning, at times, shall your fancies delight,
While other lines later will torment and bite.
Expect for your eye to shed sadly a tear,
That lands moments later to angrily sear
Your wheal-textured flesh that does shiver in fright
At visions seen but in your mind’s shifting sight.
For here is right chron’cled and detailed with pain,
A hist’ry intended as more than a chain
Of hap’nings, events and of mem’ries thus told;
These words are my spirit whose pages unfold
My sacred existence and absolute ties,
Where all other stories ‘come nothing but lies.
Allow me this privilege, this grace and this right,
To make known my journal, my quest, and my plight.
For now I am old and my time closes nigh:
My neck feels the tingle of Death’s coming sigh.
This candle, new lighted, burns hot and feels bright,
Affords me some hours past vespers to write.
So feed yourself comfort, and silence to drink,
Alone must you taste this: to eat is to think.
And while you are chewing each verse and its rhyme,
Remember this truly once happened in time.
So swallow with care my life’s hist’ry and past,
Lest too much becomes of poetic repast.
My name, friend, is William. Monastic my vow.
A Brother I’ve ‘come, for ‘tis God I serve now.
In all that does matter of me at this age,
Is merely my habit hung over this page.
For I am a monk many years to the Lord,
My quests, once completed, away went my sword.
I came to this cloister most weary of war,
And of living battles I wanted no more.
So settled me here in these shady, old halls,
Where regiment structures what sleepiness scrawls.
This abbey is quiet, with pen and with script,
‘Tis here Death awaits me, below in the crypt.
But I have not always reflected from old:
My face was once younger, my blood want of cold.
I long ago travelled good Leighton alight
As chivalrous charmer: A troubadour knight.
But know you now this: that these tales which unfold,
Tell not of the years wherein knightly deeds hold.
These pages are meant as a grounding and guide
To detail my life still most unqualified.
This story begins not with I as a knight,
But rather defines me a childhood height:
A tempest of boyhood, dark-sullied and rough,
With tatters and rags and my hair but a scruff.
‘Tis here where I start now recounting my tales,
I’m pressed to work quickly before my skin pales.