CHRIS BLEACH

The Difference between a poem and a scream

She had an artistic scream, eloquent even, disciplined certainly.

She often wondered if it was really a scream at all, more of a haiku perhaps -
conforming to strict rules and just occasionally containing real emotion.

She didn’t think she was repressed, certainly she wasn’t anal, and she often felt
desperate. But it was a quiet sort of desperation, just letting go wasn’t her style.

Whilst some would revel in such self control, it was a cause of regret for her. She felt
it would be more honest to vomit everything up before she wrote a sonnet about it.

So, she experimented. She tried everything. Her friends didn’t do binge drinking -
surprise! - so, she found people who did. She puked and puked but her vomit didn’t
surprise her.

She did uppers, downers, heroin, crack and drugs she’d never heard of. She tripped
the light fantastic but it was a waltz, not a tango.

She tried religion then. Bhuddism fitted her nicely, so she abandoned it. Islam scared
her and she embraced it, only to find that it was really about self control and she had
that in spades. Christianity and Judaism fed her guilt and she had enough about her
still to know that was not necessary.

Politics she hoped would feed her ideals but instead she found it the refuge of the
cynical.

And then one day at 11am at the mall, she got it. She went home and wrote a poem -
a sonnet actually - about the difference between a poem and a scream.

I’d share it with you but she wrote it in her head and then she died. I can report that it
was with a smile on her face but, unfortunately, when they found her rigor mortis had
set in and they thought it was a scream.


Chris Bleach lives in Halifax in the North of England with his wife, two children
and a dog who thinks she's human. He writes about business for a living but much
prefers to write about life. He has been not been writing and submitting for long,
but with the encouragement of his internet writing group, has had several
publications including stories in Eclectica, 7Q and SOR.







© 2006 Underground Voices