Dear Joe:

You are welcome. Reading your writings and communicating with you is always a pleasure.

A powerful movie, Carrie. Revenge by telekinetic powers. The Prom, her good night, almost. Her new beginning, almost. Instead, she is drenched in pig blood, an intentional reminder of her traumatic locker room incident.

Revenge is righting a wrong by going outside of the law, a form of justice; it is exercising power to hurt back. Mostly, I see it as exercising power. One becomes a victim because of lack of power, be it at the hands of a parent, powerful in size or by the role itself. Be it a child like Carrie, already harmed and weakened by her mother, making her more likely to be bullied in school. Exercising power successfully is the intoxicating pleasure of imagining revenge.

I understand the school bully showing up in your dream caused you to write this poem. It is the accumulated injury by family members and peers in school and people elsewhere that builds that fire inside, the fire of anger and the desire to take revenge.

Can you give me an example of how you use brutal honesty as a form of revenge and how it has been working for you?

anita