A/N: My beef, in this poem, is with certain practitioners of Christianity (and probably other religions) who make an effort to not get mixed up in the “wrong crowd” – and then proceed to define the “wrong crowd” as anyone from atheists to gays to nonconformists of any type.  Differences of opinion and biology don’t make a person “bad.”  The “wrong crowd” is anyone who would take advantage of you or hurt you.

“Rage”

You ask what rage is?

            When everything I am is against the grain

            When to be “good” I must lose my soul

            When I know down deep within me

that there’s nothing wrong with me

that I’m right, and I’m good and I’m real,

but you look at me and you see the peripheries

and you say I’m bad, and I’m wrong and depraved

(unsavory maybe),

but I’m not and I know it, and still there’s nothing

I can do.

What I believe in, who I love and how I think

are not your business.

(We all need something different.)

I’m not evil for rejecting your God.

When I march through the rain and hear

the red mud and feel the music of the water

and I find love --

that’s more of a religion than anything

you’ll ever know.

When I can understand myself and notice

the minute details of life

(take pleasure in them and be at peace in a storm of anger),

then I know I’m onto something good.

When I can move from a table of druggies to

a table of missionaries to a table of artists to

a table of nerds

and break bread with all, alike and appreciated --

I’ll trade yours for mine any day.

            When you call me unsavory

for things that can never hurt you --

I am what I am and I will not, for you,

give up fully half of my most natural instinct

for the appeasement of your theories.

(Still and all, I don’t hate you for your vice.)

I am what I am and I know what I know

and intellectually, we’re just at a

parting of ways.

            I simply want to be able to be what I am

and I can, but you look on me

with such pity -- fear.

            When simply being who I am makes me evil

in your eyes

(proper thoughts are sacred),

that, that, is rage.