When my friend opens her mouth, hatred and ugliness comes flying out. I look at my wife who mirrors my quizzical expression and we wonder how one person could hate everything so much? True, she’s not rich, but certainly not poor either. She isn’t an ugly woman. She has a loving husband, nice children and a few wonderful grandchildren.
Perhaps age is creeping into her mind and she’s feeling mortal.
Has she been angry for so long that it just seems normal or does she just enjoys being angry.
I have to wonder, does she care that she’s becoming intolerable?
Tag: anger
What Decade Is It
It seems we have traveled a very long way
Just to end up where we started from
Still taking most from all
And giving it all to some
The incompetent march and all cry foul
They say that soon their time will come
But let me tell you a tale of a long time ago
When the people partied, sang and danced
They all drove their cars to the cities
Just looking for some romance
But all the women they found there
Wouldn’t give them half a chance
The farmers all hated the factories
For putting their women on the job
The white men hated the blacks
They said they were nothing but a mob
The Catholics hated everyone else
While the rule makers just polished their knob
The new women said they knew what was best
That their mothers had it all wrong
The politicians praised how all the people
Worked together to make America strong
It was the poor that wrote the words
But it was the rich who sang the songs
So I ask if any one of us
Will ever know just what to do
In a country where the left says they’re right
But the right says that they are too
And up in the big house around the corner
Lies are touted as the gospel truth
Jason…
Janice has withdrawn into herself again. She’s setting there on our yard sale couch staring into a TV that isn’t even on. With the old quilt, that our grandmother made, wrapped tight around her; though it’s eighty degrees in our trailer. Her face is sunken and her skin hangs lose from fragile bones. Like all the emotions have been sucked away from her and left her deflated.
I sit down next to her and she leans into me, resting her head on my shoulder. We set for an eternity in our silence just staring at the floating specs of dust in the sunshine. It’s like we’re frozen inside a snow globe.
“I hate Fridays,” she says to me. I smile because I know she’s trying to push away the ugliness that is shrouding her.
“I know Jan.” I tell her, because really I do.
It was three years ago on a Friday that I found you huddled in the woods, just off the path that we used as a shortcut from school. We took that path everyday together…except that Friday. That Friday, I wasn’t there for you because that Friday I tried out for that fucking school play. I found you there, shaking so hard I was afraid your bones would shatter. Your head was in your hands and the tears burning the scuff marks on your cheeks. I heard you whispering between your sobs, “No, no, please no.”
You were only twelve years old and collapsed into a pile of flesh and bones. Left discarded in the woods like some wounded animal. I found you there, with your clothes covered in your own blood. Your innocents ripped from your soul. You wrapped your fists tight into my sweater as I picked you up. Your eyes squeezed shut because you never wanted to look at anything again. There would be no beauty left for you in this world. I carried your trembling body in my arms. Your convulsions were so heavy that you vomited onto my cloths; your tears so large they washed it away again. Your short wisps of breath floated into the night sky along with all your dreams. All I could do was tell you that it was going to be okay…but I knew it never would.
While you searched for some answer, you cried, “Oh God, why, why?”
I don’t think God will ever give us those answers my dear sister, but I will always hate him for taking your childhood away.
Jerry Brotherton 