The Angry Ones

They snarl in the night,
their lies bared like angry teeth,
ready to rip those they envy,
those they hate,

ready to pull the flesh
off the happiness of others
as if, in doing it,
they could transform their venom

into power, into the joy
somehow lacking
in their dark, sad souls,
certain of the power of secrets

to bring down,
to recreate truth
and deflect the light
that reveals

their own emptiness,

About this poem

The picture is of an outdoor sculpture on the side of the road that runs to the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, Vermont. I’ve passed it now and then, always slowing down, sometimes stopping to look closer at it, for the past year or so, sure that somewhere there was a poem in it.

Finally, it came.

Tom