Misplaced Anger

I've never been a great thinker. I've always been more of a reactor. Perhaps even a hyperreactor. I'm a knee-jerk jerk whose effect lashes out due to cause. Or even... for a cause.

I am angry, and I break and belittle and shatter and ruin before I can feel better about myself. It really doesn't take a lot of thought. Effect engenders affect. The perception is the message.

Those who lose at love:

• Lose a loved one
• Sense imminent destruction of a loved one
• Love unrequited
• Love expiration
• Love fueled by love/hate

Love lost, i.e., an inability to find it, fetch it back, or save it — that is me.

Such exsanguination leaves a vacuum where anger rushes in, cocked, ready to fire. At the slightest provocation — whether snark, imagined, contrived, misunderstood, or confabulated.

When the sine qua non of life's quest unobtains, a come-and-go — the two-way street — of essence, all meet in turbulence, both love and anger, misplaced, frothing and boiling until the skin blisthers; until there are little tears in the heartseams no fabric is special enough to mend; until there are little holes in the mind no adventurous gray matter is neuroplastic enough to heal shut.

This is me. It is I. Someone misplaced is someone lost. The arrivals and departures are tumultuous; the passing in revue, offensive; the rejoinders, defensive.

Feel the draft through these tragic windows of my soul; squint against the harsh glare of the light shards that lasercut carelessly at the speed of light; cover your ears to deafen the harshness that conters the euphony from those unafflicted: sounds discordant and dissonant and acerbic and vexatious; taste not the bilious retching that is too sweet, too sour, too acrid and that goes down easier than it comes back up.

I walk under a cloud ready to burst its darkness onto anyone I feel is too dry of expectation. I carry an ill wind ready to dessicate anyone I feel is too wet with love. I mount a powerful electrical charge ready to conduct incineration to anyone who tempts me with a divining rod of life's purpose.

Hope and desire stand aside as I pass through these congested streets. The beautiful decays as I do; the hopeful despair; any pleasantness twists upon itself into self-destruction. Self-esteem becomes self-loathing.

I am misplaced anger, ready to leap out at you, who are at your most vulnerable to receive me in my bloodlust.

You have no defense. You cannot fight back. The only thing you can do is hibernate without dreaming. Sequester yourself, immovable, away from my irrestible force.

Or surprise me. I fear what I don't see coming. I tremble at the unknowns strewn.

And, like that very love doomed to be misplaced, I am blind to the unexpected. I am startled into inertia by the unpredictable; what I deem undeserved. When I miss, in all the camouflage, that soul lifting itself up by its soulstraps and heartstrings and the most powerful antidote to being deprived: forgiveness.

I paint forgiveness with clashing colors, but the true hues emerge after the tears have washed my work away. I curse forgiveness and eschew absolution — these are for suckers. Not for me. I am no sucker. Which is why I will always be so successful.

And so hopelessly unhappy.