Poetry project, phase 2, week 2: Full Metal Poet

[pjthompson]

Sometimes my anger is an ice scalpel
cutting with pleasure, glorying
in slicing, hungering for deeper cuts.

Sometimes my anger is a bludgeon,
turned outward to smash and bully,
to get my way, to assuage my ego.
This anger never holds sway:
guilt beats me back as hard as I hit.

Sometimes my anger is a snake
devouring its own tail. But this
Ouroboros, instead of infinite wholeness,
destroys, particularizes, breaks apart.
It consumes me, digesting my own bloated
corpse, dissolving me to nothingness.

Sometimes my anger is a vision,
sweeping away denials and delusions,
forcing me to see things as they
truly stand: in dreamless clarity.

Sometimes my anger is a fire god,
burning me clean and truly righteous,
pulling me up from the pyre to stand
and speak, to do those needful things.
To change myself, and thus the world.

 

My friend Kevin, after reading in last week’s poem about rivers devouring children, said I was a real Metal poet. I agreed that sometimes I was a #FullMetalPoet. This week’s entry does nothing to dispel that notion, I suppose, but that’s why I love poetry. Like all the best things in the world, it doesn’t always have to be pretty.

 

 

*For the poetry project, phase one go here.

*For a definition of Phase 2, go here.

*To see all the poems in one place go here.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Comments

[sartorias]

That is a very effective poem.

[pjthompson]

Thank you!

[hominysnark]

Very true and real.

[pjthompson]

I try to be. :-)