Drak

I'm very apprehensive about showing these lyrics to my band. They have been trying to encourage me to write from a more personal perspective, but I'm wondering if this is a little more than they'd bargained for.

Strangely enough, it seems safer to get some feedback from complete strangers first.

So, let me know if I should just burn it:


Soul Killer

I close my eyes and
Into the nightmares I creep
Memories of what he said
The Soul Killer steals my sleep

“You’ll always be ugly inside
No matter what others see.
You’re nothing at all
…and you’re nothing to me.”

The terrified boy
So afraid of this man
“I don’t love you, he says,
“…and nobody can”.

I close my eyes and
Into the nightmares I creep
Memories of what he said
The Soul Killer steals my sleep

Fists of rage in my face
The pounding and the beating
As if it were happening again
Mind-Movies repeating

I close my eyes and
Into the nightmares I creep
Memories of what he did
The Soul Killer steals my sleep

Memories of what he did
The Soul Killer steals my sleep
…Scars and broken bones
Reminders to keep


Lyrics: Drakkar Haggar
Publisher: ©U.M. Publishing Group

VEGANGELICA

Drak,

Don't burn it. I like the personal perspective on emotional and physical abuse of a child by an adult male figure (probably dad). Emotional abuse leaves many kids feeling worthless, like you describe, and they carry those scars and internal messages into their adult lives, where attempts to cope and heal can lead to myriad additional problems.

I feel many people would relate to your lyrics. Talking about what happened is the first step toward healing. I like the lyrics because they succinctly describe the way the terror of the past haunts the present.

One suggestion I have is that you write: "I close my eyes and / creep into the nightmares, / memories of what he said. / The Soul Killer steals my sleep." My reason for this suggestion is that I prefer lyrics that retain the word order of natural speech. If I were saying these lines, I would say, "I creep into the nightmares" rather than "into the nightmares I creep." A downside of my suggestion: it would weaken the rhyming.

An alternative would be to write, "I close my eyes and into the nightmares creep memories of what he said," in which case the memories are creeping into the nightmares.

I think the challenge in writing about such strong subject matter is to prevent the lyrics from seeming melodramatic. I suspect people often feel uncomfortable with a stark and disturbing subject and may think the writer is somehow exaggerating or not 'sucking it up.' I think people are often uncomfortable with expressions of vulnerability, when in actuality expressing vulnerability is the strongest thing a person can do.

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