Rage

One man's record to be bound into madness. Solitary confinement, or maybe, just insanity mixed with loneliness. Silence mixed with noise. And dreams mixed with an unpalatable reality.

I’ll rage on through the blood and the tears

For blood and tears are all I know

A fine wine that burns through all pain

Fury that cuts through any sadness

 

Drying my tears with the flames of hatred

Fighting forever

Stumbling drunk over bodies I cannot count

I rage on

 

I’ll rage on through the evil people with intent to kill

Through those who think they are better than me

Through the unacceptable times

My soul has been wrecked to s**t

 

Countless times

People kicked me while I was down

Do I look back? Never

I rage on

 

Our madness is wasting away in the sands of time

The rage doesn’t care

 

 

I’ll rage on through this frigid world,

Where cold people with steel hearts beat down on each other

In a frozen wasteland of despair

As I shiver under the crossfire

Crucified by purgatory

 

I rage on through a blind, mad god

Lacking the humanity it created

Yet still only accepting that as fealty

Along with obedience and praise to bring about

Some form of all-consuming love our desperation for never could

 

I rage on

Like a boy who loved

With every drop of blood in the rapid rivers of his winding veins,

Just to receive such hatred for not being an ocean

That his salty tears dried into warpaint

And he battled his own demons until he became one with them

And saw the self-pity and righteousness that was his hallelujah

 

Without love or mercy, these thralls that hunger are never full

Yet they still ask for a helping hand

After all the pain they’ve caused

Throughout the empty world full of colour-blind people

Pretending to see red

The rage does not understand

It doesn’t want to

 

 

I am unable to accept a world that is full of hate

Which fuels my own hatred,

Creating a cycle of bloodshed that will always continue

I rage on

Not knowing any better

Than to burn out until I am nothing but cinders

As I wither

The chains that bound my body to limbo before hell

Are the only arms that would ever hold me

Safe in their embrace, an angel of asylum

 

I walk through the hatred

My rage swallowing the pain

I learn from this world of sorrow

And now I’m going insane

I don't want to be here anymore

Worming my way through the straitjacket of city alleyways

Between thin buildings

Out of our disjointed sin combining as one orifice

Raging deaf letters of broken sentences

Of spoken word,

The only sentence I have ever served

We just can’t weep for fallen souls

The empathy is buried in our hearts

But I wear only the sleeves

 

 

(Rage)

Understanding the meaning of despair

White noise, wrath, and anguish

I rage on in my padded cell

Hoping somebody will hear me

But would that change anything?

(Rage)

Once more, blessings etching maleficent manifestos

Crescents echo incandescently vesicular

Immaterial murals of spherical delirium

Abandoned dandelions pattern my salamander labyrinth

Surrendering the remedy to the remnants of my renaissance

Push-pinpoint-blank in a claustrophobic utopia

And finally, I understand

That everything

Means nothing

Sound and silence finally become one

Static, chaos, ferocity and calm polymerize into this real dream

The dream stretches farther than the mind

(Rage)

Until the cell is no longer a cell

But a forest, a landmass, a new beginning,

An island surrounded by the shroud of nothingness

Until a whimper from outside my kingdom lulls me awake

Perhaps the violence of another Atlas

To carry the weight of a separate world

And I realize

How lucky I am, to be so weightless

That I no longer feel the burden (of the rage)

(So violently worn upon my shoulders)

(Either God or Godless)

(Enough to bleed for)

Of time burrowing through my skull

Of the world I carry separately from myself

And I, like many

Am just an island

In a vast, endless sea of silence

Filled with islands that scream without mouths

(Rage)

The tide echoing their shores with waves of static

The tide becoming the only cure for silence

Sitting in your own filth

And other people's tears

Cushioned by it all

Soft like an egg yolk

Shattered, a shell of a man

And finally, I understand

That everything

Means nothing

But would that change anything?

Would there be anything but rage?

Left for me to give you?

In your unbroken existence

 

Not made fragile

Built piece by peace

 

Will someone like you

Follow the same mad path blind?

And take the weight of this world

Off my slumped shoulders?

(A hundred men?)

And even if one waking dreamer were to see the truth;

I am no monster

(Just lonely)

Just what you find tormented at the end of a long, winding, road

Or a hallway of endless labyrinthine corridors with doored bolted shut

Some lost tattered thing

In the wake of a nightmare called the world

(Rage)

Would that change anything?

When finally, you understand

That the weight of everything you carry

Every step you stumbled

Means nothing

At all?

 

(Rage)

That every cell in your body is a birdcage?

The lungs breathe the attic air in from a stairway of ribs

The fingers yearn to take flight in a canopy of hands

The eyes wander between the spaces in the back of our heads

The blood descends the elevator shaft arteries

The heart beats until still

No

You don't know me

You don't know

Anything

At all

 

(Don’t touch me)

(Don’t touch me)

(Don’t touch me with your calloused hands)

(Worn in by the sheers of this world)

(Don’t touch me again)

(I have my rage to cling to)

(I am blanketed under the cascading bedsheets of a bloodred sunset)

(I detest the coldness of your warmth)

(The cruelty of your kindness)

(I’ll find heaven in hell on earth)

(In a crowd of lonely wolves)

(Longing for the moon)

(I am not helpless)

(I simply cannot dare to lose)

(I am not broken)

(I simply carry on with a book full of bruises and scars on my shelves)

(They cannot beat me)

(I feel the imminent break of their boundless strides)

(Stalking closely; I am the shadow of the moon)

(I am the carelessness of the wind)

(I will not lose to the whip crack of their hands)

(Or the jackhammers of their feet)

(I am not a stray nail)

(Anymore)

(Let rage)

(Be my last judge)

(My last match)

(My last song)

(My wish)

(Before the cold to come)

(Before I face the black engine left within my dusty chambers)

(In the cinders of my six-cylinder-saxophone heart)

(Crying out in the dialect of a wildfire’s flecks)

(Let the music roar)

(I will swallow you and spit out your callouses)

(Until you are nothing more than a dry mouth full of seafoam)

(Nothing but my initials scratched into trees, and concrete, and sidewalk)

(Nothing but a mural of my blood slick over the sewage drain)

(I am the rust left behind after being pulled from wood and flesh)

(I am not the/a stray nail)

(Don’t touch me)

(Anymore)

Author's Note

Based on another poem of mine called "I'll Rage On". This is a longer, more emotional, and overall better poem. Several more years of writing makes a difference.

The words in brackets are largely optional. If you read it with them, compared to without them, you are reading two different poems. It's meant to be that way.

I very seldom reply to reviews, but I promise I read EVERY single one. I look forward to my next review, because it helps me learn. Even if it's just one word, I promise, I will be ecstatic to have the chance to hear what you have to say. Whenever you write something about my poems, or the themes of my poems, or criticize me it is not in vain. I will listen, learn and be thankful.

Reviews

[Pete]

wow. angry doesn't even scratch the surface. a vicious circle of unappeasable anger feeding upon itself because everything else has been devoured. "rage" is one of those words that speaks volumes before it opens its mouth ... :)

With every drop of blood in the rapid rivers of his winding veins

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

Thanks for reading, glad you enjoyed the poem! :)

[ALex2024]

Amazing, I love the diction, very vivid.

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

Glad you enjoyed it. :)

[Aeri]

who reads the whole poem?✋

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

Did you read it all?

[adornoscousin]

Salty tears dried to warpaint is a phenomenal line.

[R.J Calzonetti (SinisterPotatoe)]

Thanks for reading! :)