Here is a difficult piece of writing I'm working on. It's not anywhere close to finished yet but I thought I'd put up the process for people (not unlike the tree triptych).

Fields of anger lay fallow
Beneath the growth
Of submission and shame.

(to burst forth in a tangled rainforest (slash & burn/blackened stubble)

Katrina is inside me. I would eat everything. Swallow it up and spit it back, destroyed. Kali. My anger is such that I will rend flesh, cut heads from the bodies of the living. Close my teeth through skin, muscle, tendon, and bone until canine meets incisor. I am the destroyer. My questions will fall on ears of those who only wish to see themselves experience their own visions of reality. As I was broken, I will break them. Grind their bones to bake my bread. I will lay waste to their constructions, structures, buildings, places built upon the graves and ashes of human suffering. Their walls built up from the food which could have fed children. I will rend them. Skewer them and laugh at their petty games of chance and intellect. I will undo their carefully coiffed hair by pulling one hair out at a time until their scalps bleed in proportion to their own brutality. I will take all their children, not just the first born, but all of them and burn them in the fires of Auschwitz. Medea like, I will sacrifice the children to save them from living this life. This horror of existence. To not be is better than to be. From the Chaos which bore me, I will return all things to that oblivion that place where no one can see or even think to see. No one will be spared. No one innocent of crimes. All who have breathed live on death and I will eat them all and from me no life will come. I will eat the dead, the living, history and potential. I will raise up Pandora and then tear her apart, dismember her divinely constructed being. First to go will be the children, boys (snakes and snails and puppy dog tails) and girls (sugar and spice and everything nice) so that they don’t have to experience the horror which is humanities gift to them. First to go will be the young still in utero so that will only know what it s to be fed by life. In the beginning. All was squished together. Hot. Dense. Spinning. I will take it all together again, sweeping up the detritus and re-compress it into a bitter pill and swallow it down. Then I will take my own life. Jump into oblivion. Break my own body limb from limb. Pulling apart the skin from the muscles. The muscles from the tendons, the tendons from the bones. I will pour out all organs and squish them until they pop. Burst. Bleed. Then I will unwind the proteins. The molecules of existence. I will uncoil the double helix and destroy the amino acids. I will pound the atoms, neutrons, proton, and electrons into their subatomic particles. Then, I will pull those apart until I can unspin the strings there. I will coo the fires of creation and all will reach zero. Nothing will be.

We pretend like we don’t know anger or violence. We imagine EVIL so that we don’t have to take responsibility for ourselves. For the death and pain we all cause. I put it outside myself. Breathe deep and console myself with, “This too will pass.” I have known suffering. I have received it, a poisoned gift from the gods, and I have delivered it with hands cold and rough with cruelty. I. Who people call an angel or saint. I, who can settle for nothing less than saving everyone. There are only 3 ways to end my suffering. 1. End my life. 2. End all life. 3. Save everything/everyone/ensure that all pain is soothed. I. Fields of anger lay fallow beneath the growth of submission and shame.

My heart is breaking.

I suffer as all of humanity suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. How do I or any of us come to terms with the horrors of human existence?

Mephistopheles. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. I can no more ignore that pain than I can take my own life. I can not ignore the ways in which I embody suffering. It has broken my back. Literally. I refuse to ignore my own potential as an agent of suffering. I cause harm. Irrevocable harm. My words eviscerate and my mouth guillotines. I am not a “good” person. No such thing exists.
Come close and I will hurt you. I am a minefield that doesn’t care if you use children to find a safer path through. Katrina, Auschwitz are only the beginning.

Kali. Hecate. Yahweh. Shiva. Artemis. Lucifer. Dionysus. Apollo. Hel. Katrina. Auschwitz. Birkenau. Holókauston. Sho'ah. Dachau. Mayanmar. Bosnia. DRC. Darfur. Nagasaki. Hiroshima. Khmer Rouge. Tsonaqua. A litany.

Epithets of destruction.