She was uniquely possessed of an animal's low cunning for unkindness.

We shared a common meanness.

Violence is the providence of the responsible.

To do violence is to become responsible.

I knew violence before I came to this place,

so it was not that this place taught me to be violent.

I think I taught it.

Our common sin bound us to each other.

Evil is disillusioned—

It’s a hard-won disposition.

A slur affixed to anything

that argues against the commoners' truth.

That life should be.

That the continuation of time is good and ethical.

That the denizens of observable reality

should continue to trudge

a hard road to nowhere,

for nothing and no one.

Your admittedly endearing philosophy

can barely account

for its own meager existence,

yet it seems perfectly confident that—

to be—

is good.

While knowing nothing of not being,

having never not been.

What if we were brave?

What if we stopped feeding life to death?

What if we were honest,

and considered if it may be the case—

that it is good that things should end.

That we may choose.

I was taught to believe so—

I was shown so.

Ask me.

There are no answers,

only endings.

I have become else.

If I am turned, am I still me?

What you consider yourself,

within the veil of flesh,

may not be as present as it seems.

Perhaps you die not once, but many times.

Endings frequent and unmarked,

passing without notice.

Each new waking brings new awareness—

the birth of a new voice, however brief.

He who loves us for our ever-turning hate,

For our wet hunger,

For our long and sticky fingers.

For the shine in our eye,

The rage in the haze,

The blaze of our loins.

Red man loves a fucker.

A long-tongued, graceful,

Cock-tucker.

My thorny, pale flower.

My moonbeam, whose teeth gleam, whose hunger is forever.

My sweet little terror—you've undone so much of me.

Tell me, who now has crossed this black cat's path?

One last time, then.

They will pay, and we will play,

for true terrible keeps.

Come now, wrap your claws around my throat—

I want to see how strong you've grown.

Harder!

Fill your black eyes with my want; grow sick with its fullness.

Feel it wriggling in your mind.

Scream!

Push your strange madness into the air,

fill my burnt lungs.

Don’t let them put me in the ground.

Take me back to the water.

I don’t need a stone above my head,

scratched with my name.

Names are for people.

I was just a process—

a pattern in the running stream,

something to be washed away with time.

It happened once to me.

Death.

Peering up through the murk at a fading sky.

I became ground, I became deep calm water.

Then breath.

Licking the sex from the inside of your heart

with a rough tongue.

Thigh meat dripping from predator's teeth.

The whole body,

every stitch of bare skin,

an organ to summon orgasms.

I will earn your screams,

your tears,

your earnest pleas of stop

that you can't take anymore.

Stretched in ways

you didn’t know you craved.

In this moment,

every bit of you is mine.

Not because you owe me,

or because I've earned it,

but because I can,

and I want.

Seek not the sublimation of weakness—

detest only that which is not truly the self.

Hunt the false lessons.

It is not of me

and will not be harbored within my being.

Intend to fire a bearing

along the faultlines of hate,

to the heart of the matter.

Always trust hate:

our stalwart burden

and most truthful servant.

Whatever I am,

whatever particular brand of bent,

I am few and far between.

I used to think I was evil—

I prepared myself in a child's idea of evil arts:

violence, magic, and song.

Strange, the naïve evils we choose.

One I met thought we were sociopaths.

We were violent, true,

but in a sporting way.

For us, violence was a game—

serious, but worthy fun.

I think we didn't understand violence.

We were numb to our deeper selves,

we could hear,

but could not translate.

Not until later.

External reference was little aid—

a limited frame of petty shuffles

and fiction.

We had no sense of the scale of it.

He went to join the marines,

to understand what it felt like

to kill a person.

It killed him.