This free-verse poem is the darkest, blackest, worst thing I have ever written. I don't really feel like this although I can imagine feeling like this. But an incident at a bank the other day really set me off and I just went with it.
PAIN
I would vomit angry fists of rage.
But I push them down, silence them for the world, and they pound against the inside of the facade that is my face. They pound against the back of that wall until it is slick with their blood.
I would scream swinging aluminum bats of hate.
But I push them back, protecting those around me, and they hammer viciously against the base of my skull. They rise from my lungs, beating against my tightened throat with the “ping,ping” of cold hard metal.
There is no direction I can turn.
All the compass points are cruel barbed fishhooks, straightened with hateful intent, pinning me into myself, snagging my flinching skin with rust-filled sickening pain if I move.
I cannot speak or I will gag out the fists of rage.
I cannot scream or the thug-swung aluminum bats of hate will crush the skulls of innocents around me.
I cannot turn or torn metal pain will rip the skin from my muscles in thin, horrible strips of blood-shaped shivering agony.
So I stand. I shuffle. I silently wretch horror. I taste it, like dead children.
If I don’t smile you think me sullen. If I don’t reply you think me rude. But if I open my mouth you may see inside my head. You would kneel in the street and beat your skull against the curb, beat it to a bone-fragment clotted sack of brains so you wouldn’t witness the red-black churning razor blade landscape of emptiness and pain that is the blood hacking its way through my veins.
Be thankful I seem rude. It’s the best protection I can offer you.
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