Back twisting, heart wrenching pain.
Pain so real it stops you dead in your tracks
leaving you motionless pain.
In that moment of still movement
your pain crashes into anger -
migraine inducing, face twitching
absolutely blinding anger that leaves 
you in the middle of the road
not knowing where to go
	I know how you feel


It’s an all-consuming anger,
an anger that makes you feel like
you’re on fire and never cooling,
an anger that’s rooted in every fiber of you
that was you before you even became you
attached to memories so far back they echo
to the beginning of time and keep going.
A cruel anger that’s taken heroes and 
shriveled them down to tormented statuettes.
An ill-advised anger that makes you feel 
even more anger because you know exactly 
what it’s done to your neighbors, friends, classmates,
family and lengthy list of ancestors
who were all (like you) justifiably angry.
Yet the anger remained while little changed
	I know how you feel


And it’s a persistent anger.
The kind that drives you to the streets
to start war, real emphasizing anger.
Leaping on cars, throwing insults, bricks and
your soul, wanting to kill the perpetrators 
and reason for your anger.
Setting on fire the buildings, places, things, people
that remind you of your anger so they
can feel the burning depth of your anger.
A crazed inferno that stops cities, states and 
upturns entire countries is the type of anger 
you’re dealing with.
Grenades being thrown, People no longer standing
Nightmarish anger that hurts to the point
you cry in your sleep because this cannot
be real, strange anger
	I know how you feel


The anger never leaves.  Not at all.
No.  Instead, it brings friends.
Depression latches on to your anger.
A depression that buckles your knees
and makes you fall when you feel it too much.
A lewd, raping, complete loss of
innocence defining depression;
happy, walking home, care-free candy held by
a child innocence.  Shot, beaten and killed
by a stranger in the dark because I don’t know
nor like you kind of depression.
Envision the kind that leaves your young, dead
body lying in the middle of a rioting street
on a sunny summer day in August depression.
Consider hearing ‘Not Guilty’ time and time again
but to you and yours, guilty shouted in 
2015 type of ways daily, 
burdening, inescapable depression.
Or the one that slices you each time
someone doesn’t care, acknowledge or understand
that it is both human and logical to feel
how you feel after yet another social injustice 
Occurs.  That upmost illogical and extreme depression
	I know how you feel


Then you find it has grown into
an apathetic anger.
One that cares for no one and nothing.
A thing that sees pain, death, poverty
contemptuous inequality and says everything 
Is alright – a wholly selfish apathy.
The self-aggrandizing type, in charge of
an anachronism of a system that devalues,
dehumanizes, and falsely accuses and imprisons,
and leaves it be.
An unholy apathy.
The nature that would go to church,
pray and worship in God’s house,
and thereafter standup and demonically
murder 9 of God’s children in cold blood,
Beyond prayer apathy.
The breed that becomes so desensitized 
and numb to it all because the scope
of its entirety is too much to bear.
A self-serving so you can get up another
day variation of apathy.
	I know how you feel


An all too serious anger.
A joy stealing, humorless ‘I have nothing 
to be happy about’ subset of anger.
The character that ‘I don’t laugh with you, 
because you’re laughing at me’ anger.
Those centuries gone that drive you to pray
and hold on to God because he’s all you have,
generations of necessity stemming anger.
It’s a very serious, tricky and unfortunate thing
this particular cast of anger.
It has you put on your stoic face,
slip on your well-pressed, back-straightening clothes
over your multi-broken heart and cleave to a prayer
that holds it all miraculously together
	I know how you feel
	I feel it every day too.