They say us red heads have
tempers like East Coast weather
unpredictable and vicious.
I would argue this point but
it would only send me into
another full blown raging whirl wind.
I turn into a Snickers-less Joe Pesci.
I become Oppenheimer.
Without a moment’s notice.
Even my Jekyll is more like
most people’s Hyde.
Today when I could not find my hat
I felt like I needed it
like some average Junky,
then the more I couldn’t find it,
the more I became Herbert Hunke.
Suddenly I was a barrel short
of 12 angry monkey’s.
I miss a bus and start mumbling
to my room:
“How in the history
of all the holiest fucks
of fucking fuckers
have I lost this goddamn hat
when I have yet to leave the
house today?”
The theories get elaborate, fast.
Some kind of starving, stray
micro-goat-like creature
which normally subsists off odd socks
has not found one lately and has
decided to get brazen.
I must still be wearing it I say,
and pat my red, slowly
sweat-gathering
heavy hair.
Nope.
I check the legs of jeans
startling my bed’s frame
like crusty farmer clothes on
rickety, birch fences.
My inner Shining
declares that
Genes got me here
to begin with.
I go to punch air
and I hit the corner of my door
gashing open my hand,
now I’m bleeding and
cursing and mumbling and
tossing clothes around
like a baglady at the last
Sally Ann sale of the Earth
positive that any second I will
start to shit out everything
I have ever lost
and that’s a lot, a lot, a lot of shit.
By the time I give up and
put my hoody on
I’ve missed another bus
I’ve screamed in italic’s of cuss
I’ve prayed like a desperate Catholic
to a Mexican pick up truck’s Jesus-rust.
Curse this temper of mine.
All it was ever good for
were broken Super Nintendo controllers
dry wall craters covered in NIN posters
and a good post-meltdown chuckle
like the one just now,
while writing this poem.
Maybe that’s enough.