Explore Poems: Anger

            ]frequently            ]for those     I treat well are the ones who most of all        ]…

I’m here
             to tell you 
                             an old story. 
                             This
Appears to be
                 my work.
                                I live
                                in the world,
Walk
         the streets…

At my beloved’s burial,
I can’t see his body.

Only carnations. I hear
your name and my beloved’s

in the …

I come from the kidnapped,
                                    the assaulted—
my country’tis of reparations as in-store credit
                     ...

Here, the sentence will be respected.

I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.

For example, all sentences will begin with capital letters.

Likewise, the history of the sentence will be honored by ending each one...

In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...

Mama birthed me, Papa sold me in the land of weeping willows
Traces of sin trail miles across skin, I go by Never Forget
My body’s evidence of daddy’s pestilence spread across the land

His sin traces my skin, a path never forgotten
Nameless,...

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
     unseen power; For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

Years later I will remember this terrible time as not only about myself

Or not only that to punish my father I made myself unhappy

From my window I could see that much else was wrong

Across the street new construction had struck...

As a child I knew I was
good,
adorable,
and safe.
Because that was what my parents told me,
that was what my grandma told me,
that was what my physical therapist told me,
that was what my teachers told me.
So I believed it.
I rolled around in...

If a jar of jelly is $2.98
& a loaf of Hawaiian bread is $4
Then how much bail money will I need when I kill everyone in my house
for eating all the bread
and jelly in 5 minutes?
 
Black Momma Math
If Black Momma...

you mean well, but
when I say I hurt         when I say some part of
my body hurts      and you say oh, did you do something?
I hear       what did you do? As is, it's your fault,
there's...

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the sculpture...

And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. Asia Graves looks straight ahead as she calmly recalls the night a man paid $200 on a Boston...

It was never in the planning,
in the life we thought
we’d live together, two fast
women living cheek to cheek,
still tasting the dog’s
breath of boys in our testy
new awakening.
We were never the way
they had it planned.
Their wordless tongues we stole
and tasted the...

He was a good boy
making his way through
the Santa Barbara pines,
sighting the blast of fluff
as he leveled the rifle,
and the terrible singing began.
He was ten years old,
hunting my grandpa’s supper.
He had dreamed of running,
shouldering the rifle to town,
selling it, and...

They ran out of cuffs, but
with apologies for the inconvenience,
they carefully wrapped barbed wire
round the wrists of the political prisoners
who, as if in a ritual stretched
their arms out to the young masters.

The spikes strayed into the flesh still
and the prisoners...

In the sad hotel that drinks a swamp,
You breathe malarial air and enjoy
Frog music piped in from the dismal swamp.

Bits of your life measured out in bars,
Your thoughts gripped in clamps,
Your lips pierced through

With fish-hooks, locked shut,
Silenced over the stab...

I have nothing to give you, but my anger
And the filaments of my hatred reach across the border
You, you have sold many and me to exile.
Now shorn of precious minds, you rely only on
What hands can grow to build your...