An Altar for My Rage

For the Black Man Tap Dancing Between Emotions

I greet you

from the remnant of my mind

that is angry with the world

because it cannot hold my light.

It prefers me dimmed, digestible,polished for panels and pulpits,not luminous, not layered,not alive.

I’ve been dragging myself through days,

trying to hold it all together with a single piece of dental floss while acting like shit’s okay.

You ever try to look normal with a scream caught in your throat and an obituary in your inbox?

Or be constantly reminded that you don’t matter.

Or be told to sit and look pretty—as if dignity were decoration.

Or work for free while they cash checks off your back.

Or smile through the lie they swore was love.

Because if I was to tell you how mad I am—if I acted from that remnant,if I let the grief in my chest come out in sound and sweat—I become a show.

I become the angry bear.

The snarling Black body they bait with disrespect,poke with microaggressions,and then wonder why I roar.

I become the volcano.Molten.Magnificent.But too dangerous for their dinner tables.

I become a spectacle.

A hashtag.A warning.A talking point in someone else’s diversity training.

Not a man.Not a child of God.Just noise.Just threat.

So they chastise me.Cage me.Arrest me.Label me.Erase me with headlines, hashtags, or hollow sympathy.

And still, I am conditioned to suppress.

I wake up. I show up.I serve.I forgive.I breathe.

If I shockingly show a smile,it’s survival, not surrender.

If I drink until that space is numb, it’s because my grief doesn’t clock out.

If I lay dormant for hours,

I’m just trying to soak up my sun before the world snatches the light again.

Hoping one day that peace collides with reality.

That lies won’t be kindle.

That joy won’t feel like guilt.

That I won’t have to contort myself to be counted as human.

Because we were never meant to survive.

But we do.

Awkward.Angry.Alive.

And that, too, is the study of God .