Kriegman; or the Memory of an Angry Man, a poem
sharp toothed and quick to bite,
but a disgusting boy in the eyes of humankind.
He had been born feeble, impressionable.
Could he have been saved if trained right?
If he had been kept in his cage longer?
There was something rotten inside him
that hadn’t been released with a bullet to his head.
It would live with him forever.
It would turn his bark into a bite,
and his bite into a gnawing, guttural cry.
He would grow teeth, though his bones had long stopped working.
He came home with his own blood in his mouth,
his teeth in his head, and his brains on the floor.
He was coming home. He had returned.
A mess of bone and warmth and love shaped into a man
had now been reverted back to its original state.
Only now was he contained, a box underneath the ground.
Had they smothered him in love?
Had they planted a flower and watered it
until it could no longer grow?
Had they taken away his reality,
making him only focused on clawing his way back to the surface?
While those around him had younger siblings,
small children destined to shape themselves after them,
He had no one to take after him,
no one to grow up with the memory of him,
just three people who now lived their lives to forget him.
His apron will be thrown away,
but his name tag will be saved and hidden away,
his hand prints in flour will haunt you.
There will be an empty space, dark and vast,
but it will be avoided, maneuvered around.
His heartbeat had once pounded furiously,
blood rushing through him in anger as well as happiness,
but nobody had opened their eyes to see the second half of him.
The story of his life did not just end,
the binding of the book had been removed,
and used to create stories of a young monster.
No arms would wrap around him,
for his skin was serrated, torn to pieces by his love.
His weakness was his devotion.
His devotion was his demise.
It was the blood next to him, the blond hair laid next to his brown locks.
It was the face next to him on tape.
