life is more than a dress rehearsal

Quietly the change comes upon me.  Soft and stealthy at first and then with roaring, hide and sinew exploding everywhere.  Anger is a rough handler.  He pounds you down into the ground, through the tunnel to China—expectorated out the other side of the green orb.  If you’re already in China, you tear apart Butte, Montana on your way out into the chasm-pocked deep.  (I say “Butte, Montana” only because it seems appropriate not because I know it to be geographically across from the vast provinces of “China”—-poetry should never be technically accurate about the insubstantial realities of life.)  Anger is like the Red Bull in The Last Unicorn, God help us all.  I feel like the last unicorn sometimes—the geeky leftover of a glorious mythology.  Not enough like the harpy or the pegasus to really be myth but not enough like your pet pony to be led into your foyer and fed apples and sugar during a tap routine.  Its hard to be stuck between myth and fact, poor unicorn.  People only believe what they can see in front of them or what is so far removed that it shimmers ever before the mind’s eye. Magic is stuffed.  Anger is stuffed.  Real feelings are stuffed under the ice, let out through a little whole, baited by wicked hooks that sting and rip and exorcise the darkness of Below.  No body wants to go down to the Deeps, all by themselves rummaging around the insides.  People tend to get lost in the dark, and above all—thank GPS—we forbid ourselves to get lost.  Its too stressful, not knowing what’s next; so we make up games, the rules whereby we predict outcomes, generate patterns and expectations.  Most expectations get met, of course.  And if they are disappointed, you could have expected that.  Anger knows.  Anger sees.  Anger doesn’t feel and so mocks you for feeling.  Maybe anger is a big red bull, charging through the forest, hunting down the last of your weak glories.  (This, of course, is the kind of anger that petty people feel for themselves and each other—not the rich, dazzling anger of a righteous lord, wreaking havoc on behalf of the trammeled.  I feel that’s an important point to bring up.  Pardon the digression.)  Anger.  Anger.  Anger.

There.

the many faces of anger