Honest Anger

A fragmentary poem that equates honest anger with lightning, valuing emotional force that is sudden, clean, and undisguised.

A six-line poem that thinks out loud by trying a simile, rejecting it, and committing to the next. 'Honest anger is like thunder // No // Honest anger is like lightening // Yes it is.' The poem is the act of choosing between two images of the same storm and landing, with flat conviction, on the one that strikes rather than the one that merely sounds.

The whole poem is a self-correction performed in real time: thunder is the storm's noise, an after-rumble, while lightning is the strike itself - and honest anger, the poem decides, is the strike. The bare 'No' and the answering 'Yes it is' give the lyric the rhythm of an argument with oneself settled by insistence rather than reasoning, so the form enacts the very directness it praises in honest anger. The misspelling 'lightening' is the source's own and is preserved; it does not soften the line's force. Brevity is the argument - a longer poem would be thunder. The text is clean and the reading sits directly on its lines.