The Tide of Anger

 Here I sit on the couch

six feet from you, typing this

as softly as I can so that you

won't yell again

you don't have control of the

words you say or the things

that you do, you react 

like a buoy in a storm

miles off the coast of 

healthy

I recoil and hide in

my shell of muscle

and macho, my man-mask

You seethe, a soulfilled shrill 

scream, a hot haunted house

in your lung and a barbed-wire

band bound round your helpless 

heart, your fingers fly on phones

pushing pain and hate to all 

who will listen, my finger 

cuffed and gagged, typing

so timid as to not wake the pain. 

Wait Weight

 oh you motherfucker 

you dangling participle 

you clostrophobic cancer 

I gotchu 

I gotchu right in my fuckin' sights 

I begged to dance 

But the knee on my chest

drilled down deeper

sternum shaking breath breaking 

bastard, Anxiety! 

You have had your last dance 

with me motherfucker and

I am coming in the night 

with black-masks and 

pipes to kill your wild 

dreams motherfucker 

I am not playing 

I am not paying 

some Yale doctor 

two hundred dollars 

an hour for you to 

fuck with me

I am the fucker 

motherfucker 

You look different

I stand at the edge of the quarry 

waiting to dig some unrecognizable sludge 

from beneath the surface of my heart 

- what broken pathways and sanguinary 

offices breathe in labor and in 

love - to the drum of a long-forgotten war 

- what young man went to battle the 

patterns of his parents to realize 

no, remember he is them, 

still battered, still punctured by 

bullets of fathers and father's fathers, 

still bloodied by breasts of other mothers

no other lovers bring the milk  

the guppies and the seed, the swimmers 

of a forgotten dream, laid to waste 

on the tightly woven carpet 

of a motel room, near the window

with the spread and the decorative pillows.