Mask. Sparks. Floods

I balance rage worse than anyone I know

I feel like two scorched sides of a single coin

Most have layers, parts of themselves they alternate between

A diplomatic decision, a choice

Most have two doors leading toward two separate rooms

I have two separate doors leading toward the same dead end

My forest is blackened with aggression, no sun peaks through my dense obscurity...

A poet - that's what I call myself

But words, unless scribed, do very little for me in the way of expression

Most days I choose silence, it seems less of a risk

I've seen too many lights dim from pupil, my truth spoken is like a game of axe throwing...

It doesn't matter where it hits you, it maims

I've become the best at absorbing the hate I project, look up at my sky and watch the reel set my sky on fire...

I am wrapped up in my own desire to feel, but the tentacle wraps around my jugular - the only thing I feel is inability...

I see my talents as angering, a reminder of where I fell to my knees during the race...

The punishment is not having finished, but rubbing toes among bedsheets with the infidelity of talents wasted on me...

I am the spark in a flame that will not waste away

I am the flooding of a city that will not crumble

I am the stubborn resolution to feel the need for change, and the silent insolvency to stay the same...

That's the formula for true anger

Walk in place on a road that stretches before you, eternally, and your knees will crumble before your first meaningful step...

Sulk in the emotions you know you should utter, and you'll breathe in what it feels like to suffocate...

Anger is neither patient nor compassionate

It is not tender nor understanding

It will fill your lungs without letting you drown

It will peel back your skin and unravel the voice within that yells for separation, merely to silence it again...

I speak of you but this is for me

A small win in a battlefield surrounded by trenches owned by the leviathan

An expression of sorts hidden deep within my combat boot

By the end it's message will smudge against my bloody heel

And it becomes a loss

A loss of composure, the loss of right thought, the loss of reason

But what's a writer without his or her anger?

What's a story without trauma?

What's a twist without a sad revelation?

Have I chosen the drowning lung, the flooding city, the spark in the flame?

If anger was an identity, did I don it's mask?

Is it too late to seek the person below the cowl?

Sometimes I feel it isn't

That maybe the roadmap isn't written in crayon and knife carvings

That my compass always points north

Takes little time before I realize that north has become an unreliable narrator - leading me astray...

Ad Astra is not where I'll be

My final destination seems compressed by walls too high to see it's peak -That must be the walls of my ineptitude...

An ineptitude of self traversal, my maze is a mystery even to me, angering yells boom out like megaphones leading the way...

…leading the way into obscurity...

I see no reason to seek the end of this maze, I have no need for the archways and pillars of the shelter awaiting me at it's end...

…it's too late...

My anger has changed me, it has groomed me

I may be lost in this maze of self-discovery

But I've grown weary of the fight outside it's walls

…so...with this spark I light the path with anger and rage, with this flood I quench the beast from delusions of grandeur, and with filled lungs - I hold you to it, like compressed air....

…tame the anger that's kneeled me for so long...for I am it's mister, a paramour, a kept man...anger is my mistress, my true talent, and my only genius...