Fevered fury creeps up my neck and throttles my words
with filthy, scarred fingers. I’m chained
powerless to a chair, and those fingers again are clawing at me
prodding and provoking a maddening desire to pronounce
soiled pockmarks of spoken wrath. But,
still they lay, impotently immobilised by incorrigible politeness,
and a fearful advocacy decrying the urgency of the quarrel.
Absorbing obnoxiousness like oxygen, we have all sat quietly by
wavering with tremors of a discontent encompassing years,
and always embellished by the missing manifestation
of a longed for demise, or an extension to our grudging tolerance.
Allow us a more agreeable reprise, then,
than that which we etch into our skin;
that which we repeat every morning.
Not without a parting salvo, is departure earned:
dropping egotism and dripping vitriol,
coating everything in a film of foaming scum.
It crawls into nostrils, invades tear ducts, burns at pores,
and stays infectious deep within you, even after
you no longer see the symptoms,
no longer recoil at its scourging effects.
Forever changed I wander alone
Forehead damp with this fever I cannot shake.
My hand, too weak and loose to gain a grip on the crises,
hangs limply and resentfully by my side;
I stare at it some days, its febrility awakening the beast in me again
and any knowledge I had of gentleness,
falls from my pocket and is lost.
I lose these parts of myself daily.
I hear them crackle,
as I crush them underfoot with my every step.
One day I will stop looking for them,
the fragments of me that I have shattered.
They’re turning to grit and, like me,
blending with the dust of the road.
Book of Pye 
