Anger

by: Brick

written and posted for Systember on September 30, 2024

posted here on October 6, 2024

Boiling rage compressed to building blocks. Foundation of separation. Healing. Heat is life and I am an endless well of will to live. One more second. One more minute.

I can be sculpted and fired again and again. I am a limitless cycle of walls, stairs, ladders, ramps. Step up.

I have done this so many times that I don’t need the mirror anymore. Just the curves of my body, whatever this body is, whatever dimensional reality it exists in. My skin sucks in the scalpel so my muscles can spit out my viscera.

My blood libations quench our parched world. Let it go. Let us grow.

I can be sculpted and fired again and again. I am a limitless cycle of walls, stairs, ladders, ramps. Step up. Again. Again. Again. I loathe the heat that begs my broken heart to beat.

“What would it be like if I hadn’t hinged my self-worth on being the smartest and most competent person in the room?”

The soft warmth of an invitation makes me crack. I revile the desire that pours forth, molten and glowing and terrible. I am not supposed to be witnessed. I am supposed to be a ghost. I am supposed to stay out of the way. But I feel the filth that is the fiber of my being held tenderly, even tremulously, and know that those days are over.

Let it go.

I can be sculpted and shaped with warm hands again and again. I am limitless potential to serve. Guide the clay of my being with your fingers and smooth my edges with firm strokes of your thumbs. No matter how fervently I beg you to crush me, you refuse.

I am full of blood and organs and scarred skin and muscle but I need to nourish us and I need to hold up something. What, if not walls? With what, if not my insides?

Boiling rage and brick-firing ovens extinguished. Healing. A low simmer of submission fed by unspilled blood and guts that, apparently, are supposed to stay inside. Come closer. I haven’t earned it but I don’t care because I have earned it and even if I hadn’t, who the fuck cares? Heat is life and I am an endless well of will to live.