Irrational anger like a plague in the open ocean.  Nothing to stop it aside from cold insulating liquid and rotten fishnets.  Fire on the exhale.  Freebase static electricity on the inhale. The combination makes lukewarm aggression. This isn’t the superheated sucker punch aggression that ends in handcuffs.  This is the venom that churns the evening news and drags the flags down to half-mast.

Candlelight vigil energy, before the tears, and after the Jesus candles have wilted.  Today, with cigarette tip eyes, I’ll play boogie man.  Prepare the troops.  Raise the drawbridge.  Ring the gong.  There’s ugly afoot.  

Bare-chested and ready for incoming arrows.  A grin like a machete wound.  A heart wrapped in kevlar, shined with steel wool.  I see the lanterns flickering fear in the windows.  The castle walls are afraid of my darkness.  Armed guards allergic to my eye-contact.  I’ll scatter the entire town with a sneeze.  Belch a brutal reality through the groundwater.

Today, I’m the war that you’ve been ignoring.  I’m a puddle of mud in the middle east.  Worse, I’m the reverberation of a thunderclap in that same puddle. There is no hiding.  You’d have some hubris to call on special forces.  There has never been a force so appallingly special as this dark fire.

I eat oxygen as tinder and spark matches on my own split tongue.  I cannot be stifled by headwinds or suffocated by the weight of a thousand oceans.  I’m built before the idea of conflict.  Greed needs me the same way your body needs a spine.  Demons tuck their tails beneath the sheets at night, sweating pus and puking blood in anticipation.  I’m the kind of cancer that pulls the hair from the head of the Dali Lama.  

You can squeal, but I’ll break the back of prayer over my knee.  I’m meaner than doom and faster than sunlight.  There's nothing after me and no use in fleeing.  I’m am the indignation who pulled the trigger of the big bang.  I stare into the sun and piss into the wind.  I’m the enemy inside your head.      

I am the poison in the pen.