Friday, December 29, 2017

The stuff of legends

Rage was my stock in trade
my default response to life
and one never knew what might
make me blow
during the first forty years of
my life

But...that anger was nothing
compared to the towering fury
that developed after the family
did an intervention on me for
my alcoholism

It's a miracle
(and I am a miracle and so is my sobriety)
that my head didn't
explode during that first year
I was that mad and
everyone knew it and
everyone stayed the fuck away from me

family of origin or recovering family
tiptoed around or flat-out avoided me
after a few encounters with the
newly sober, newly 'feeling' me

fangs and fingernails and feelings hyper-extended
daring anyone to give me a reason (to rage or drink)

***

it is fourteen years later
and I rarely lose my temper now
or even feel that simmering emotional violence

recovery has taught me to control, channel, and release
those emotions in more productive, positive ways
and to not even respond in those old, dangerous ways
in the first place

but both sets of family are still talking
(and now laughing about, though they weren't then)
about the terrifying, menacing (even to me) animosity
of my early days of alcoholic abstinence

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