Anger or just Pain

Anger or just paint

Is anger a way to harm?
or a way we learn to hold ourselves upright?

A way to shrink another
to feel taller for a moment
to borrow the shape of strength
to clutch control with shaking hands?

Or is it guilt
stacked quietly on the chest
or shame
or pain passed down
by mouths that never learned mercy
pain that grows
when no one listens?

It begins with speaking to walls
With words returning unchanged
echoing back into the skull
circling
and circling
until thoughts become noise
and silence becomes cruel

Buckets fill this way
Slowly
Drop by drop

They overflow not in whispers
but in floods
voices spilling across rooms,
loud enough to survive
loud enough to prove
they were here

But voices are dangerous things
They bend in other people’s hands
Words are twisted
pain is edited
grief reframed as threat
made to look like harm
when it was only
a reaching
a grasping
for comfort
for air
for witness

The buckets fill again

Words are misheard
Intent dissolves
Meaning fractures

And beneath the anger
beneath the noise
beneath the sharp edges of sound
there is only this

a wanting
to be held by understanding
a wanting
to be heard