here's another poem thing

 So here's the second thing I wrote for creative writing. Again, honest feedback is very welcomed, please give me opinions.

The Ballad of the Phoenix Man

This story, though it may be called a ballad, will not be written as such. The typical structure of ballads are not favorable for long, intricate stories, and while I would love for this to be a long, intricate story, that would be rather difficult, as not many details are known about the Phoenix Man. I, myself, do not know a single thing about the Phoenix Man other than his name, and what little my grandmother could tell me from when she saw him that day when she was nothing but a young girl walking to the grocery store at night to buy her mother cigarettes. What a strange era, where a girl no older than seven could walk unattended down an unlit street and buy nicotine.

My grandmother told me that the Phoenix Man was standing in the dark and narrow alleyway between Mike’s Candy Shop and Hal’s Convenience Store. There was nothing in that alleyway besides dumpsters and a stray black cat living under the pieces of a rain ruined cardboard box, but my grandmother would swear up and down until the day she died that she saw him there. Him, the Phoenix Man. She walked by the alleyway and caught sight of him standing in between the buildings, swaying side to side like he was drunk. He was not drunk, though, because just as my grandmother was about to ask if he needed help, the Phoenix Man burst into flames, blindingly bright and so scorching that my grandmother could feel their heat on her face all the way from the entrance to the alleyway.

My grandmother told me that she went into shock. She couldn’t believe what had just occurred, and it stunned her so badly that she found herself unable to move, unable to run for help and alert someone of what she had seen in the alleyway between the candy shop and convenience store. She was glad for this shock, though, because had she not stayed, had she run away in fear of what she did not understand, she would not have been able to watch as the man rose up from the ashes of his own body. She remembers the pile as too large, more dark ashes scattered in the alleyway than there should have been. It was as though his entire being, all eight feet of him (I used to believe that her recollection of such extreme height was simply the imagination of a short, scared little girl) had simply converted into ashes, the fire acting as a gateway for every inch of him to transform into the little gray grains. And from that pile he emerged, fully human once more.

My grandmother told me that nobody believed her. Not one person in her small hometown took any worth in the word of a young girl known to have a wild imagination. Nobody thought for even a second that she was telling the truth about how after the man rose from his own ashes, he simply dusted himself off and walked out of the alleyway, giving my grandmother a wink as he passed by. When she recovered from her shock, she ran back into the street to catch sight of where he was headed, but the Phoenix Man was nowhere to be seen; not by my grandmother, not by the other citizens in her hometown, not by any one living person since that night in the alleyway. I believed her, though.

My grandmother told me that I would be lucky to ever lay eyes on the Phoenix Man. It took thirty years before I did, although my experience was slightly different than hers. I did not see the Phoenix Man in an alleyway, nor anywhere near a candy shop or a convenience store. I saw him at my grandmother’s funeral. As we gathered around the hole her casket was being lowered into, I saw the man my grandmother had described to me so many times standing behind the crowd. He did, as she had told me and I had not fully believed, stand around eight feet tall, his head towering over those of the grieving funeral goers. As the others around me focused their eyes on the casket, I watched as a woman who looked just like the body in that very casket stepped forward and stood next to the Phoenix Man. They looked at each other, then at me, before smiling softly and bursting into flames. I paid no attention as the people around me began to shovel dirt into the hole where my grandmother was to lay to rest, but rather stood fixed as I watched the piles of ashes. It took only a moment or two before the forms of my grandmother and the Phoenix Man rose from the piles and stood together again, my grandmother looking younger and happier than I had ever seen her be in life. They walked away toward the trees lining the other graves, and that was the last time I saw my grandmother.