If life was a Happiness Workshop
we'd all be waging inward war
with every little knock upon
the door of mistook opportunity.
For happy[ is a fleeting flash
of nothing]ness in children's
trashy fairy tales is an ever-after
dreamlycheating scam[bling
face to hide our pain behind]
 
Alarm bells ring with vibrancy
whenever voices say to me
"I only ever want to see
and hear of positive things
not negativity's worthless
strings of startling stark
realities of war-torn lands
or strands of cold banalities
or weird alleged conspiracies
which undermine my energies
built-up with endless
self-hypnotic therapies
but most of all because they
take the sheen out of my smile".
 
That's what they say. I know that smile
it reeks of lies and hides those busy
fireflies which cast the light upon your
heart which really bursts with pain and
anger's screaming question marks.
 
If some brave soul would prise the
grinning lid which vainly covers up
that inner rancid squirming mass
of smile-enshrouded infant pain
which yells "I'm all alone please
don't leave me yet again!"
a blazing storm of near-death
rage would soon envelop all who
dared to bend the brittle bars of
anger's ruthless cage.
 
They say we needn't worry much as
there are Anger Management schemes
designed to repress reams of misplaced
outrage, fury, wrath and snuff-film dreams.
But that just makes the chasm broader;
we sit on mounds of molten ire
long suppressed beneath the dormant
dust-cloud spread of veiled volcanic spasm.
 
You wonder why there's so much war?
Please don't look far but open now
that hideous, stiff and gnarled old door
which begs your withered hands
to turn the key and then I promise
you will see the rage which few will face
but which unleashes untold hurt
upon the human race.
 
        (I see it all so clearly now.
        It burns my soul then disallows
        my face from being turned away.
        To write these words, I’m duty-bound
        or I will not by rest be found;
        there's no escaping from this fray).
 
A sea of anger vast and deep —
the secret kindling
of this fallen world —
a tinderbox
of wounded memories
powering all our
nodding donkey smiling frenzies
wrapped in new age platitudes
defended with an attitude
which means that if you dare to
strip away the smooth veneer
of modern smiles
then swiftly buried you will be
in piles of angry outraged faces
desperate to obliterate
every inconvenient stain of
engrammatic primal pain.
 
Now if you find that you don't like
these words of mine and what they say
consider all the bombs which blast
in every corner of the globe —
each bomb's explosion like a bishop's robe
(orgasmic stroboscopic flash)
to camouflage the fury from our past
which, now repressed, we do not feel
with consciousness
but which, as time moved on,
we have amassed.
 
If you're still doubting what I say
then think of all the gun crime now
which features every day.
The gun is just a penis firing off
like masturbation's narcissistic
crude ejaculation with all the anger
of our dim and distant infant past
welling up through nation after nation.
It seems we cannot cast our clouded minds
back to the culprit war-creating times
unless a warm gun can express
the happiness we long ago
gave up on ever finding.
 
(Knife-crime isn't far removed
the knife a perfect penis-substitute
slicing deftly into flesh
our fucked-up hormones
once distinct and fresh
now spilled like blood as
male and female mingled
and enmeshed in
hermaphroditic puddles
denying nature's law
no longer even are we
of our bloody gender sure
as maidens, trousered, walk like men
and knights resemble neutered hens
while gunmen knifers
cruel low-lifers laugh
their way to the septic tank).
 
Now if you have the hardest time
believing in these words of mine
just look at all the women who
with angry madness in their hearts,
make loud and smelly childhood-based
political correctness farts —
(another kind of warfare just the same) ---
chant slogans, make themselves as hard
as nails and then they emulate
the qualities they think are male
but really they have missed the point
of what it means to be a man —
a real man, that is, and not the sham
which lounging lizards do display
or macho rap[p]ing dudes portray.
For manliness in truth I say is never
pushy, loud, or full of rage
(although it should be engagé).
 
A true man knows what courteous is;
he opens doors and stands aside
and isn't thrown when woman's pride
refuses his good graces.
 
Authentic man will not play ball
with games which have been
engineered by social forces
made by those whose interests
have been vested in the quashing
of the dangerous din of
distant truth’s despair.
 
A real man truly knows his place —
knows what he was born here for:
Not to be a hammer battering
his way through life's dark race
nor a mat upon some woman's floor.
Instead, his heart a two-way river flow
with all the love a woman needs to know
a solid mass of tree-trunk branchful poise
unafraid to be the man that he is
his balls intact and gainfully employed.
 
A real man faces straight his past
and won't let his[s]tory's olden days
dictate his mood-swings or create
those ugly, puerile anger-blasts
which nowadays so often you will see
contrived in women who have failed
to wrestle free from family dynamics
learned with dread on their father's knee
(while mum looked on so helplessly)
later afraid to let themselves be
the ladylike complement
everyman needs.
 
Everywhere around us
spikey and stark
the breakdown of Venus
by rude matriarchs.
The Eternal Feminine
buried beneath a
plethora of premises
which have nothing to do
with rights or social needs
but instead they sprout
like red splenetic
seeds of hateful
rageful blind
and vengeful
totalitarian decrees.
 
Just where did women learn these skills
of strident, brash and thrusting force?
The answer lies within the web
of mother-father subtleties
the twisted-up relationships
her father brusque
her mother weak
maybe abused
amidst some shrieks
or mother a controlling hag
while father way behind did lag
all of which was viewed at source
and disapproved of —
primary cause
of child remorse.
In other words
concerning their sores
(to settle their scores)
they learned their roles well
from those old parent wars.
 
Perhaps your dad desired
to have a boy instead of you.
He never really said so
but somehow you knew —
a cruel expectation in view
of who you really were.
Impossible to please him
the squeeze was on for you
to dream up ways to make
him smile instead of scowl.
So now you find the thought
of pleasing any man a chore
you slew your girlish charm
so that men wanted you
no more. (But if they did
you then ensured they’d
soon regret being lured).
 
Or maybe (I say God forbid)
some pervert touched your private parts
when you were oh so very small
so now you drape your body grown
in manly sackcloth’s neutral art
to cover up your female side
and fight for rights you wished you’d had
when dirtysweaty hands were placed
upon your little body chaste
the guilt you felt (you said “I’m bad”)
now you’re angry with the lads
and don’t know why. Those memories
etched beyond the sky no longer
in your frozen mindly thoughts.
 
When they were kids, the rage began to roar;
inside, the anger, covered-up, was stored;
waiting for a fitting time to be expressed
on something else (the real cause suppressed).

Will all those broken angels now
compulsive smilers, gunners, knifers
hurt but hardened women-strifers
summon up the daring pluck
fondly fuelled by love to lever
up the lid and seize the many-fingered
squid of awful ancient pain
and so restore unto themselves
the marsful mantle of the man
with woman’s aphroditic span
their rightful places taken in
a world transformed
to peace again?

I wonder if the lie has gone too far
for us to push that stiff old door ajar?