Anger is the atonement of art
spilled from our bellies
the ugly red pills
of my shirtless obsessions
Your hair, draped across
my face while I watch
you sleep,
a promise
your mouth
your feet
are planning
not to keep
© Jilly’s All Rights Reserved
“Love is raw as freshly cut meat,
mean as a beetle on the track of dung.”
~ Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason
Day 20 of 28 Days of Unreason
Jilly's 
Jilly, I’ve had a lot of anger to deal with in my past due to my violent upbringing and have looked at it in many different ways. I’ve never looked at it the way you have described it in this poem and I like this different way of viewing it. You did a great job with this, thank you! Blessings, Deborah
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Thank you, Deborah. It’s a challenging subject to deal with and to write about.
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Yes it is! ❤
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am completely taken with ‘shirtless obsessions’ – a bitter pill of a poem in a one-sided love
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Thank you, Laura. Obsessions seem more raw with more of skin.
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And this, Jill, is why so many prefer to consider love best left as a spectator sport. “the ugly red pills / of my shirtless obsessions” I love how this turns us from a definition “Anger is…” to view the cocked and baited mousetrap of a one-way relationship (better, unrelationship). Beautifully and sparingly written. Horribly effective!
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Thank you, Charley. This one felt like it wrote itself.
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It doesn’t read like it.
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Thank you!
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I absolutely love this. I thought it would carry on as a lovey-dovey poem…. then reality hits hard. Life is harsh sometimes.
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Thank you, Vivian. I am a fan of irony – the twisting of our expectations.
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😊
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So well done. I bow in awe…
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Thank you! Wrote this from the male voice, a challenge worthy of tackling.
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Hmmmm. Interesting thought. Thank you for that.
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Go for it, baby!
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Fascinating. The first line is amazing, and so is the second. Opens us up and we don’t know where we are heading after that. The hair makes no promises that the rest of him won’t keep, very strong. I can link it back to the beginning and the anger. But the shirtless obsession remains wonderfully vague. It is the line I keep returning to.
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1. Written in the male voice. 2. What is symbolic in a shirt? 3. What attitude(s) can be attributed to a man who goes shirtless?
I set this line up to work in at least 2 ways depending on how you answer those things for yourself.
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Ah, written from the male voice makes more sense. A he/she candidate!
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That was posited by another reader, too. There is one coming that is doubtless.
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Anger, obsession, promises not kept–all put together in this bleakly spare poem. Wonderful.
(In my head, this is a white room with light wood, no clutter–but there is bright color on the bed, and maybe a red rug. . .)
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Love the conjured images! Perfectly sets the symbolism of the scene.
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🙂
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