i guess i need more mentally disturbed
friends.
i’m feeling lately like the scab that’s been picked off,
forgotten, dried up, designating.
people don’t understand when i say my heart feels like it will
explode out of my lungs, throughmythroat and get caught between
myteeth.
my anxieties need a **** buddy, because making eye contact
is even too
much. and i wish i could stop assuming the worst.
"jesus, you worry too much"
i can’t help that i find the flaws, the nit picky things,
the traits that i want to squish like
blueberries.
i can’t help that when i sit alone in my car,
i think too often of swerving into highways and wondering what a deer
sees before it
dies.
that’s why i don’t talk about this, i never can anyway,
they swell and sit upon my tongue like when you ate that pepper whole
and all i tasted was flames.  
my anxieties and i are the kind of friends where we speak nicely
and are all smiles in front of one another,
but as soon as we turn around,
all we say is venom.

My father
Was a violent person
Hot tempered, serious, tense.
Always, always tense.

I tried to deny it
But deep inside
I feared him.

Whenever I sensed a sudden change in his eyes,
A sudden flicker of anger on his face,
And even a sudden thickness in the air,
The fear kept creeping back

It was not the alcohol
That turned him into a monster.
Just how, in the right mind of a person,
Punch his wife,
Tear her hairs out of her scalp
And leave her body with bruises?

Just how, in the right mind of a person
Abuse his wife in front of his daughter,
Nonetheless of her daughter’s presence?

He’d hurt me too sometimes
When I tried to intervene,
To save my weak mother away from his grip.

He never apologized.
Not even once.

She was a force of nature
Her blood ran as cold as a tundra
Her thoughts spun like a tornado
She was the reason hurricanes were named after people
She could leave you drenched and defeated like a tsunami
Her kisses were electrifying
God gave her the beauty of a spring flower
She was a natural disaster the news forgot to warn you about.
She was catastrophic