Bed Time for Anger

A poem that fell out of my head one day.

I was on a bus on my way home from seeing my daughter on her birthday. It had been a long haul and I am currently ‘sans voiture.’ My thoughts were disrupted by angry voices coming from somewhere in the recesses of what many will refer to as their ‘subconscious.’

I questioned the origin of these intrusive thoughts and feelings and wondered where they were coming from. As I reflected on this I sense the crying of an infant. An infant tired and uncomfortable and desperately in need of love and attention.

Could these two ‘voices’ be connected somehow? Was my angry voice an expression of an inner child left to cry on some occasion deep in my past. Perhaps on an evening when my parents had been to exhausted themselves to attend to me, they had left me to cry. Perhaps, in their wartime generational wisdom, this had been the norm.

Either way the experience gave me a poem:

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Bed Time for Anger

When I shout at the world for no reason at all,

I hear a baby crying.

When I shoot you down with Gatling fire,

There is a baby crying.

Anger rises, bile bitter cloying rage and serpent’s fangs incising;

When spite and hate tear at my heart,

There is a baby crying.

When the cruelty of day to day conspires to ensnare,

That baby keeps on crying.

Rage in bloody torrents, curse in impotent despair

Baby keeps on crying.

Blind without reason screaming murder and treason,

Drinking poison and barbs from a broken glass,

That baby won’t stop crying.

Those cries are reminder

Remainders of infant fear,

Alone in the dark wishing

Someone was near -

To hold -

To comfort -

To swaddle and soothe,

Smooth down the bedclothes

Warmly soft held,

Love without question

Falls like feathers on the brow.

When you hear the baby crying -

Hear yourself.

Infant root of adult pain -

Give comfort

To that younger you;

Alone in the dark

Crying out for love.

When I am truly the man I know I am,

I feel the baby sleeping

Teaching back across the years

I feel the baby sleeping

Physik heal thyself I hear

Some lessons must be learned with tears

Wash away the pain and fear

The baby, peaceful sleeping.

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I help people develop greater creativity in their personal and professional lives.

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Big love.