Backlash Poem by Holly Jamestone

This time the cloak of your miserable life
Crashed onto my head so hard
It nearly sent me to my knees
As your screaming pierced my eyeballs

Like a loud cruel slap all your missteps
And life derailments went off the tracks again
And plowed through my livingroom walls
Crushing my heart into the hardwoods

Shaken to my core, trying to make sense of
This latest mirror-cracking, nonsensical ire
Seething viciously over sides of a caustic cauldron
Predictably to full roar before eruption each January

Blowing to smithereens those in your wake
After an ugly life’s slow boil simmers for years
A festering angry volcano and nasty scab ‘neath
Hardened skin of an existence that never forgives

Haunting, taunting on the playground in the Bronx
Kids who bullied you about your size or lack thereof
Looking down on you figuratively and literally
In what should have been a sweet boy’s school recess

At day’s end, returning home to a screaming mother
A butcher father often absent during the nights
When banging the flower shop lady up the street
Your mother unleashing more eye-popping rage

You grew up and got the hell out of there
Moving cross-country, trying to find your mettle
A Pisces swimming against the current in
An ocean of life too harsh for your pale existence

The icing on this crumbling cake comes after
Dipping your pen in company ink, marrying the bookkeeper
A bun in her oven and nuclear green dollar signs in her eyes
The fateful year you made your first million

No one would ever demean this crusty man again
In your new playground of life, shield in hand
Paying the bills, coming and going as you pleased
A cold “New York nod” announcing your return

Poor she, ultimately bearing your three children
Whom you admittedly barely knew the names of
As you practiced law behind a veiled existence of
Dozens of vitamin bottles, cluttered desk

Mother of your children slowly unraveling
Reducing you to rubbish, the ladder’s bottom rung
Toxically mirroring your scolding mother
Trapping you in the throes of caustic chaos

Alas, you had hitched your cart to the wrong horse
A stable of instability in a Hemingway type family
That unknowingly procreated mental illness
Unrelenting blemishes, rollercoaster rides

Illness in full bloom in the garden of the wicked
You in its ugly clutches; weeds and mud slung about
Botanic nightmare, open wounds, three children
Their mother briefly living in a sanitarium

Kids grew up in slow motion, off to college
Shrapnel remains, broken man now insane as she is
Stony resolve, impenetrable ice-filled veins, vacant eyes
Thawing, erupting every January into Mt. Saint Senseless
Seething, spewing, screaming in angst

BACKLASH

(1-12-2014)
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