She had a fellow Quaker waiting back
Behind at school for her Fall return:
My inner rage went red, then inky black,
As coal-hard hate began its bitter burn.
She called him soft—a coward! So I thought,
A pacifist, a scholar, and a boy,
And in brute bloody fantasies I fought
And fractured him like some cheap toy.
She seldom spoke of him, but when she did
It always caught me with no good defense,
And so the jealousy was hardly hid,
A stinking cancer she could smell and taste and sense:
It ate like acid at our August days,
The dread distrust that when it enters…stays.
09-05-75
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