Bad Terms

                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.