Work Text:
Anger
You know it
You hate it
I don’t have it
As long as I can remember
I’ve never been quick to anger
Frustration, occasionally
never anger
But as the pen in my hands
Quakes and cracks into mosaic fractures
I feel a deep, alien fire in my throat
There’s a new, exquisite anger
My poetry isn’t good enough
Aren’t I fueled by fire?
Burning flames, bright and intense
of passion and pain
And as the people I depend on
disappear one by one
As my health, still bruised by half decade scars
refuses to alleviate or even ameliorate
I feel angry
I want to scream
And yet, as the blaze overtakes my heart
The ink on the paper, on the table
It’s not what it should be
Not as good as I used to make
Fingers tearing into page after page
A skill, a touch once had
Now forever lost to trashcans
and stained notebooks
A distraught reminder
A sickly cyclically cynical taunt
That no matter how much I try
I never measure up
It used to just be to others
And now
I’m not even as good
As how I used to be
I write in blood, flowing text
Gliding from battered fingertips
Cursive creeping across the wall
Never as eloquent as I expect
Crushed ribs scattered cross the floor
Liver as a palate, trachea as a roller
Painting it all red, scarlets and crimsons
Erasing the faulty words with even more ink
For so long
I could express my heart’s core
Blank, meaningless scribbles
Nothing exquisite at all
A worthless art
Without the quality it used to have
I am angry