When a
relationship ends one of the strongest emotions that could possibly come out of
it is hatred toward the other party. The
two poems “What I Want” and “Hate Poem” describe some of the hatred that could
come out of a relationship. Both of the poems describe their hatred in their
own way one being a little subtle and the other not so much.
In “What
I Want” by George Bilgere, the narrator of the poem has a lot of built up rage
and hatred toward his ex-wife, which if you read this poem you can tell is a
little bit of an understatement. “What I Want” begins with the narrator saying
some of the things that he wants things like sleep, ride a motorcycle watch
clouds and then the narrator kind of slips in that he want his ex-wife to “get
leprosy, Her beauty falling away in little chunks. At first it seems as if “What
I Want” is going to be a nice little poem about what the narrator wishes he
could have then you get to see this sudden anger come out and his hatred toward
his ex-wife, a little bit later in the same sentence he goes on to say that “she
exercises her gift for doing absolutely nothing” basically saying that his
ex-wife was good for nothing. The narrator goes on to say he wants world peace,
to be lectured by a woman from his work on the history of lingerie, a nice dinner
with live music and then subtle puts his wife getting struck by lighting and
caught on fire in front of her friends who happen to be sick of her stories.
The narrator has so much hatred toward his ex-wife that he wants her to suffer
from a lighting strike and caught on fire, which is still not the worst thing
he wishes of her. The narrator continues on with what he wants, just to talk
with some old friends, have lunch with his aunt, what he wants in a woman and
how he want to read in the newspaper how his wife was given a lethal injection
because of some “program to aimed at improving the civic pride of Cleveland”
and it going wrong and she becomes a vegetable. The narrator clearly has some
issues with his ex-wife, we can only assume, with the knowledge we have, that
their relationship did not end on very good terms and the narrator is extremely
angry about it and has a lot of unresolved
Now in “Hate
Poem” by Julie Sheehan, the narrator flat out says that she hates, assuming you
take it as she is talking to her significant other, her partner. The narrator
explains how everything not just herself shows her hatred towards her partner. Her
wrist hates him, the way she holds a pencil, “each corpuscle singing in its
capillary” even hates him. Everything hates the narrator’s significant other,
she even goes as far as saying that the history of key chains hates the
partner, even a closed window is clearly a sign of her hatred toward him.
Everything is a reminder of hatred toward her partner even if it has absolutely
nothing to with the situation or the actual person.
As you
can tell by these two poems bad relationships can cause a lot of hatred toward
people if not settled correctly. These two poems “What I Want” and “Hate Poem”
both show a hatred that could come out of a bad relationship while describing
it in their own intense, kind of scary way.
