Sometimes hard-edged surreality

Well, what do you want?
Truth or lies? I am not lying
when I yell you’re a menace,
or when I whisper that I love you,
you sweet dill, the difference
is in the tone – it’s still reality no
matter what the penance.

It appears you only want to hear
the affectionate bits. You’ve said it
many times, you can’t reconcile your
loving man with the angry one who
tells it like it is. I’ve tried to keep a silent
tongue, bit my lip, swallowed hard,
walked the painful extra yards to distance
me from it. Didn’t help a bit, my seething,
troubled silence merely roused your fears anew.

Cheap and gaudy psychologists espouse
this strategy, they deflect realities, just deal
with reactionary effects; they say manage anger,
segment it and confront the bits. So the neighbour’s
bull terrorising my steers isn’t the problem, it’s that
I’d like to shoot the bull AND owner to solve it. To me
anger management delays release. It may surcease
your fears, but the problems lurking beneath are
concealed in a blanket of seriously edited deceit.

In effect I have to manage my anger to reduce
your anxiety, I must reconcile how to love you
and not be annoyed when a disagreement
effects a chain of disastrous events. We agree
these things are neither rational nor can be
explained in tangible terms. Like being in love,
like living luxuriously in a fairytale embedded
in a benign swamp of eccentric but
sometimes hard-edged surreality.
© I.D. Carswell