Poetry for Hard Times

As far back as I can recall, it's always been this way:

Negative emotions…

Unable to linger for long, not even hours or days.

They'd inevitably dissipate

transforming into fervent poetry.

I had to let them go.

I couldn't let them wreck my health.

No more stress, no diabetes, no neck pain.

I wove them into my words

spun from the threads of regret -

my perspective not heard

or even considered a bit.

I could have taught them all,

helped them express feelings and thoughts,

but I trapped everything

in poems that no one saw.

Writing them

is effortless, like breathing.

Yet, something, someone, is manipulating things

inside my mind

to withstand

most devastating occurrences:

My absent father's passing, my mother's deceit,

coaxing my sister, a lost love,

evictions, abuse, laughs and jokes

played on me; few can truly grasp.

They held power over there, while I wielded mine here.

With my pen, I wrote genuine history

grounded in actual knowledge, not narcissism

that thrived on obscured truths,

to inflate their egos

and make them forget

what once mattered.

They instilled

false knowledge,

building fictional characters

worthy of millions of words from a writer like me.