Going Ape Shit over Shit.

Going Ape Shit over Shit.

How many times have you watched somebody go apeshit?
Unspooling the tight, quiet thread of their days,
Shedding the quiet, the civil, the stay-put,
To step in the red, unfiltered haze.

It usually starts with a twitch in the jaw,
A dropped paper clip, or a slight mispronunciation,
The sudden, sharp fracture of everyday law,
And the swift, total loss of polite reservation.

A vein starts to pulse like a countdown to doom,
The pupils dilate as the reason takes flight,
And the gravity shifts in the fluorescent room,
As a worm turns a dragon and roars at the light.

How many times? Once is enough to recall
The sudden, grand theatre of human undoing:
The dignity cracking, the porcelain fall,
The storm of the id that had long been a-brewing.

We clutch our own clipboards, we look at our shoes,
We murmur of stress and the weather and traffic,
While somewhere inside us, a fuse wants to lose,
And we marvel—appalled—at the purely erratic.

For we are all walking on thin, painted ice,
Just one minor insult away from the pit,
Holding back monsters with sugar and spice—
Wondering when we’ll go wholly apeshit.