old folk’s home bully

s/he’d been teased, spit on,
beat up, insulted, laughed at &
sent home crying
on many an occasion,
all through elementary school &
when the hormones kicked in
during high school,
she saw even more turmoil
as her/his friends
drove the stake in further
ridiculing her/his class status,
her/his skin color, ethnicity,
etc., etc., etc.---
bored teenagers made her/his life
hell &
secretly,
s/he kept away her/his revenge
all bottled up inside,
waiting &
during its hibernation,
growing like the most threatening of
cancers---
s/he finally was able to leave
that bubbling cesspool of a small town,
with all the bullies
fading in her/his wake &
while they forgot all about her/him,
s/he remembered every little detail,
her/his hate brooding within,
buying her/his time.

the years went by,
as the years do &
s/he returned to the little town
where s/he had grown up &
where s/he’d been teased all those years
ago,
now an older person, with a good hunk of
change in the bank, s/he enlisted in a
home, where s/he’d heard that some of
those same people who’d treated her like
shit way back when,
now resided.

having spent many years at the gym &
dieting well, taking self-defense courses,
etc., s/he was primed & ready
to take out those few years of teasing
within the crucial teenage time,
out on those very people who’d done it,
but who now, so old & fragile,
could barely get up the energy to scream---
so s/he tormented them day & night,
while they withered away & died,
one by one,
having spent their last moments
wandering in a proverbial “hell,”
which came to them via
someone they shouldn’t have fucked with
so very many years ago.