A Place Inside. a poem by Christopher Johnson

A Place Inside

There is a place inside that we keep secret.
A place of darkness, bleakness
And madness and leaden attitudes toward others,
A place that feels like molten iron,
Burning us inside,
Crying to escape,
A place that is desperately lonely,
That wants the reassurance of mother’s milk.
A place that churns with sour resentments,
Resentments that never let us go,
That grip our spleen and turn our insides to hysteria, 
Resentments that burrow inside us like unborn babies,
That feed our self-pity,
That cry to be extinguished.

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Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s been a merchant seaman, an English teacher, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, co-authored with David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.

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