Quiet anger is cancer. It eats its way through the soft tissue of your mind, looking for your heart to attach itself to. Quiet anger is like an open wound you try to bandage, knowing nothing you do will ever stop the bleeding.
Quiet anger takes that last piece of you and twists your reality into a broken ornament on the floor.
Quiet anger is losing the argument, so it ends before one of you reaches a point of no return.
Quiet anger is the bone-chilling thoughts you have while the fight rages on, and you realize death might enter your house.
Quiet anger goes deeper than the soul. It reaches the primordial animal in you that threatens to release the beast you once were.
Quiet anger is the welt of every lash ever received. It leaves scars on the body and attempts to break the mind.
Quiet anger is standing in front of an audience telling our story, while tears make your voice barely audible, and you have to whisper parts of the pain.
Quiet anger is hearing your friends tell you how they categorize your blackness, implying that you are not as much a negro as other blacks.
Quiet anger is watching us kill each other because the self-hatred they taught us during slavery is still getting a good return on the societal scale.
Quiet anger is rotting flesh. Everyone can smell it, but no one wants to look. It is too broad a reminder of why we lay there decaying in the sun.
Quiet anger is watching a cop standing beneath the hanging tree firing his gun at a black man, shooting him in the back and calling it justified.
Quiet anger is trying to listen to Big Mama’s words, but knowing it is not your actions that have already marked you dead.
Quiet anger is being told you do not have a voice, while you are standing there shouting that we are people too.
Raw anger is losing control and unleashing your black rage on the world.
Quiet anger is sitting on death row for a provoked murder. A murder people say they never saw coming.
Quiet anger was walking off a slave ship in chains. Now, it is stepping out of a slave court into a cage.

© Q. Javon Overton 2019