Anger is a body/mind/spirit thing, just like peace. But no matter where it lives, it expresses itself in the body. Anger can be abstract, but the voice that spits out the invective and the finger that pulls the gun's trigger are both physical, measurable things. 

Anger finds it way to the weak spots in our bodies. My back and left hip are magnets for pain. One of the weakest is my left jaw, which I've clenched so violently for so long—restraining my perpetual animosities—that I've cracked my back teeth. Clenched so badly that, at one point, my lower front teeth were cutting into my upper palate right behind my front ones (a spot known in the dental community as the papilla incisiva). 

The only reason I don't clench obsessively anymore is because my back teeth don't meet. I let them rot and/or crushed them with my squelched rage and/or self-loathing, and a dentist with big forearms pulled most of them out. (One stubbornly remains, but has nothing to grind agains). 

It vexes me, my jaw problem. It vexed my father, too. So I wrote this poem about it. 

My fear of becoming my father isn't just abstract—that would be too neat and simple and harmless. It's a physical fear because it has physical consequences all throughout my body, and because of that it has consequences all throughout my life After all, I live my life within my body. When I get angry, my face changes. My being changes. 

If I get angry enough, I catch myself asking: Is this how he felt before it all started to unravel? Is this what it’s like to start losing your fucking mind? 

If I keep on asking that question, then it won't matter what I do to fix my teeth and jaw. The anger is just going to find another weak spot to congregate and destroy. 

Time to cultivate the peace thing—you know, the opposite of anger. But when will I have the time? I still have so many things to write about the anger. In fact, I've only just begun.