22 Anger poems

I wish you good luck you'll need it if you treat people like that it's for sure that you won't find people like me so easily

A man who’s trying to be a good man but isn’t, because he can’t not take whatever’s said to him as judgement. It causes him, as he puts it, to react. His face and neck redden and bloat, a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children but provoking hilarity at work where one guy likes to get his goat by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers on his computer screen while he’s in the john, then gathers a group into the next cubicle to watch when he comes back. He has talked to his minister and to his wife about learning how not to react, to make a joke, and he has tried to make jokes, but his voice gets tense, they come out flat, so even his joke becomes a joke at his expense, another thing to laugh at him about. He has thought to turn to them and ask, Why don’t you like me? What have I done to you? But he has been told already all his life: self-righteous goody two-shoes, a stick up your ass. They are right. He has never never never gotten along. He says nothing this time, just peels off the bumper sticker, crumples it gently, places it gently by his mousepad to dispose of later properly, comparing his suffering to Christ’s in Gethsemane spat upon and mocked (his minister’s advice), and tries a smile that twists into a grimace, which starts the hot blood rising into his face. This is what they came for, to see Dickhead, the bulging vein, the skull stoplight red, and indeed it is remarkable how gorged it gets as if his torso had become a helium pump, so, except for him whose eyes are shut tight, they burst into laughter together exactly at the moment cruelty turns into astonishment.

Foreword to “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch” This poem is more properly a “dance poem” than a song or chant because the element of repetition is created by movements of language rather than duplicating words and sounds. However, it is in the spirit of ritual recitation that I wrote it/ a performance to drive away bad spirits perhaps. The story behind the poem is this: a man and woman who have been living together for some time separate. Part of the pain of separation involves possessions which they had shared. They both angrily believe they should have what they want. She asks for some possession and he denies her the right to it. She replies that she gave him money for a possession which he has and therefore should have what she wants now. He replies that she has forgotten that for the number of years they lived together he never charged her rent and if he had she would now owe him $7,000. She is appalled that he equates their history with a sum of money. She is even more furious to realize that this sum of money represents the entire rent on the apartment and implies that he should not have paid anything at all. She is furious. She kills him mentally. Once and for all she decides she is well rid of this man and that she shouldn’t feel sad at their parting. She decides to prove to herself that she’s glad he’s gone from her life. With joy she will dance on all the bad memories of their life together. for my motorcycle betrayer God damn it, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man; you’ve stepped on my shadow once too often, you’ve been unfaithful to me with other women, women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might ever be put in the same category with them; you’ve left me alone so often that I might as well have been a homesteader in Alaska these past years; and you’ve left me, thrown me out of your life often enough that I might as well be a newspaper, differently discarded each day. Now you’re gone for good and I don’t know why but your leaving actually made me as miserable as an earthworm with no earth, but now I’ve crawled out of the ground where you stomped me and I gradually stand taller and taller each day. I have learned to sing new songs, and as I sing, I’m going to dance on your grave because you are dead dead dead under the earth with the rest of the shit, I’m going to plant deadly nightshade on your grassy mound and make sure a hemlock tree starts growing there. Henbane is too good for you, but I’ll let a bit grow there for good measure because we want to dance, we want to sing, we want to throw this old man to the wolves, but they are too beautiful for him, singing in harmony with each other. So some white wolves and I will sing on your grave, old man and dance for the joy of your death. “Is this an angry statement?” “No, it is a statement of joy.” “Will the sun shine again?” "Yes, yes, yes,” because I’m going to dance dance dance Duncan’s measure, and Pindar’s tune, Lorca’s cadence, and Creeley’s hum, Stevens’ sirens and Williams’ little Morris dance, oh, the poets will call the tune, and I will dance, dance, dance on your grave, grave, grave, because you’re a sonofabitch, a sonofabitch, and you tried to do me in, but you cant cant cant. You were a liar in a way that only I know: You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen. You were mean to me, and I’ve survived, God damn you, at last I am going to dance on your grave, old man, I’m going to learn every traditional dance, every measure, and dance dance dance on your grave one step for every time you done me wrong.

What needeth these threnning words and wasted wind? All this cannot make me restore my prey. To rob your good, iwis, is not my mind, Nor causeless your fair hand did I display. Let love be judge or else whom next we meet That may both hear what you and I can say: She took from me an heart, and I a glove from her. Let us see now if th'one be worth th'other.

For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000 in five days My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus, Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous Mexican male who prodigally claims My clan lines, identity and the sixteen Digits that unlock my bank account, Think twice. That less than proper name's been Taken by three ex-wives, each for an amount Past all you've squandered, each more than pleased To change it back. That surname you affect May have more consequence than getting teased By dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives. Don't underrate its history: one of ours played Piano on his prison's weekly broadcast; One got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made A bungle costing the World Series. My own past Could subject you to guilt by association: If you write anything more than false checks, Abandon all hope of large press publication Or prizes—critics shun the name like sex Without a condom. Whoever steals my purse Helps chain me to my writing desk again For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse: May your pen name help send you to your pen.

What could have been the big to-do that caused him to push me aside on that platform? Was a woman who knew there must be some good even inside an ass like him on board that train? Charity? Frances? His last chance in a ratty string of last chances? Jane? Surely in all of us is some good. Better love thy neighbor, buddy, lest she shove back . Maybe I should. It's probably just a cruddy downtown interview leading to some cheap-tie, careerist, dull cul-de-sac he's speeding to. Can he catch up with his soul? Really, what was the freaking crisis? Did he need to know before me if the lights searching the crowd's eyes were those of our train, or maybe the train of who he might have been, the person his own-heart-numbing, me-shoving anxiety about being prevents him from ever becoming? How has his thoughtlessness defiled who I was before he shoved me? How might I be smiling now if he'd smiled, hanging back, as though he might have loved me?

You jerk you didn't call me up I haven't seen you in so long You probably have a fucking tan & besides that instead of making love tonight You're drinking your parents to the airport I'm through with you bourgeois boys All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but Nowadays you guys settle for a couch By a soporific color cable t.v. set Instead of any arc of love, no wonder The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time Wake up! It's the middle of the night You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander _________________ To make love, turn to page 121. To die, turn to page 172.

I steal your mailbox, leave gum on your sidewalk. I seduce your sister, ignore your wife. I tear one page from each of your books. I convince you that I am your friend. * When people ask about you, I shake my head. When they tell about you, I nod. * Today, I hang myself from a greased flagpole outside your picture window. Yesterday, I stole your curtains.

Complex amaryllis — two-faced, multiflorus, wrath-spathed ball of ire — grows flagrantly unfragrant. Pulp-fiery the take-no-prisoners Haemanthus. Bully! Bully! Bully the bloodflower! (Blood- thirsty suffice it to suffuse.) Transfuse the lily-livered, the raging un-aromatic, the arrogant blood-rivering spleen.

. . . and it seem as though I could see my heart before my eyes, turning dark black with hate of rages, or harhequinade, stripped from that munner life leaving only naked being-hate. —Charles Starkweather On the Great Plains in March, the wind blows for days. Gutter pipes vibrate, shingles flap; things begin to come loose. Once they found old Miss Purdy wandering at midnight on U.S. 40, her dainty-laced nightgown billowing over her spindly, blue-gray thighs. It took three deputies to hold her down till the doctor arrived. On the Great Plains in March the dry elm scrapes at an upstairs window, dust devils swirl and disperse across the wide, empty fields, and a pistol shot sounds no louder than a screen door slapping on a porch.