Tag Archives: anger

Poetry

Confession

I know you won’t do it.

I know this will go
unheeded, will fall on
dear, deaf ears
that know better.
That are wiser.
That have tasted more wine
and traveled farther and
read greater volumes.
But

run away.

Now. Cap your pen.
Close your notebook.
Snuff your cigarette.
And flee.

The only thing that waits for you
is anguish,
hurting and burning
like a squeeze of the heart
and a shortness of breath,
the only cure
a cocktail of
frustration and doubt
that leaves a debilitating
hangover.

And when a blank page
is all you have to show,
the cycle revolves.
Inescapable.
And you are captive
in the eye of the storm,
weighed down by the very ideas
that refuse to exist.

Trust me,
it draws the very life
from your veins,
biting and gripping hard,
a parasite.

I understand Lestat.
I want to give you the choice
I never had.

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Poetry

And He Wept Aloud, So the Egyptians Heard It by Alden Nowlan

In my grandfather’s house
for the first time in years,
houseflies big as bumblebees
playing crazy football
in the skim-milk-coloured windows,

leap-frogging from the cracked butter-saucer
to our tin plates of
rainbow trout and potatoes, catching the bread
on it’s way to our mouths,
mounting one another
on the rough deal table.

It was not so much their filth
as their numbers and persistence and –
oh, admit this, man, there’s no point in poetry
if you withhold the truth once you’ve come by it –
their symbolism:
Baal-Zebub,
god of the poor and outcast,

that enraged me, made me snatch the old man’s
Family Herald, attack them like a maniac,
lay to left and right until the windowsills
overflowed with their smashed corpses,
until bits of their wings stuck to my fingers,
until the room buzzed with their terror…

And my grandfather, bewildered and afraid,
came to help me:
“never seen a year
when the flies were so thick”
as though he’d seen them at all before I came!

His voice so old and baffled and pitiful
that I threw my club into the wood box and sat down
and wanted to beg his forgiveness
as we ate on in silence broken only
by the almost inaudible humming
of the flies rebuilding their world.

-Alden Nowlan

Just wanted to share one of the poems that has always stood out to me.

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