You'll Be Sorry

I picked up a book in the free book room yesterday. (This is my last week of the free book room which is one benefit of this job I will surely miss). This book is a book of poems written by Jeffrey Skinner called Salt Water Amnesia. The poems are decent but not likely to become favorites, although with poetry, you never know. Sometimes a poem read and cast off becomes a favorite later on. Many of these poems are prose poems. A lot of people don't even think prose poems should be considered poems but I have to admit that I really like them. I often wish I had a better command of metaphor, simile, analogy, and other symbolic language. Then I would be able to impress people with my brilliant prose poems instead of writing them on scraps of paper to be tossed into a notebook at the bottom of my closet.

This batch of poems isn't bad. There is one that I like better than the others called White Dwarf. This is the beginning of it:

One day when our sun runs out of fuel and collapses inward under its own weight, then picks up enough mass from its neighbor to explode outward, the blown debris approaching a good fraction of the speed of light, then, then, you'll be sorry.

I like this one because it really captures an emotion I feel when someone hurts me. I often imagine some future scenario where everything goes wrong for the object of my ire. Usually my fantasy involves them realizing at the last minute how very wrong they were to have hurt me. It is childish, I know, but it always makes me feel better. And as long as I keep my thoughts to myself, it is a perfectly harmless exercise. Still, there is an absurdity to it too and that particular line in Skinner’s poem brought that home to me. Yeah yeah...Someday when the earth is in flames and you are DEAD, you'll be thinking all about *me* ME *me* because yeah...like you wont have anything better to think about. And you'll be sorry. Your last thought will be deep regret for taking my heart and stomping on it over and over until it squished through your toes. Yeah, you'll be sorry alright. You're probably sorry that you forgot to pick up your drycleaning that one time too. And sorry that you cut off that lady in traffic that other time. You're sorry alright. Riiiiiight.