The shepard
a. I like smoke when it pushes off from the water with bendy legs, and I like to rip the faint latticework of wings off of dragonflies, and I like to paint my father's ears red when he screams at me with the skin of his taut palms and his daddy-smirk cupped in the lifelines there, and I like to eat my mother's nails while she is asleep with her eyes open and her pupils rimmed in a shortened black.
I like to skin the seeping fur off of small rodents and cats with beaded noses and sweaty claws, and I like to play war with the quietest in my family telling them stories of Santa Claus and ribbon-sashes and robots and the way your stomach smiles when you slash a tire-hole all the way through, and I like to teach young children about the monsters sleeping and droning and waiting in their closets with bated breath for their departure.
I like to carve the eyebrows into your forehead while you are staring at me, scared, your eyes shiny bullet holes, and I like to watch your mouth open up and yell and fight and scream with a voice like a curled fist, tucked safely inside your mouth, and you bite down and I grin from the inside out and I begin to spit foreign language from my blood and my hands jump up in silent ecstasy and you remove yourself and I am running you down and out and through and through and you are begging for release and I will not give it to you, and I am screaming run over, little car, and you are saying no, no please, promise me you won't, no, and I am smiling.
I like to kill.
e. Johnny has left his boots off by the door, as if he has just come in.
Snow soaks through the carpet and the shoelaces are knotted, angrily. His face marks are pressed against the window, finger-smudges where his cheeks once lay. There are spaces in the dust where he has pressed down, and there is still warmth in the dining chair where he forced himself down.
The stove is throwing up sticky ashes and his boots are by the door, as if he has just come in, and I run up the stairs to find him, and I find no one there, but his boots are by the door and I take his little arms and I twist them all the way around and I ask him when he got here, when he got here, and he is screaming and there is the crack of shoes slapping hardwood and I am yelling with him and I am crying and he is pouring like a kettle upturned, red liquid and diamond cutting through into my tongue.
I bite down hard and I am saying where did you come from, and he cannot begin to yell and I am taking him and I am curving along his back and I am the sweat-stains that appear on his forehead and in his arms, and I send him chills and I fuck him and he is all of me.
I grab a hold and I say you are not going anywhere little boy, and Johnny has left his boots off by the door, his prints all over this house, as if he has just come in.
i. I promise her that I love her. I make her listen when I say it.
I bring her close and I tuck my lips inside her ear and I say I love you, I love you, I love you and she brushes her hand over the side of my face and her hands are liquid and moose skin and elephant tusks and soft deer eyes all inside her palm, made out of her body, and she leans in and she says you promise, you have to promise me this, and her voice is shaken, ripped-up, terrified of me.
She can't do this to me, she can't, and I cling to her with my hands all liquid and she cradles me like a small baby and she is so thin and disappearing, and I am shaking all over and I retch and pull back and I say no, no, you can't do this, you can't, and she says I'm sorry I didn't I didn't and she is throwing her hands inside of her face and her voice is barely a whisper and she says please I'm just so hungry, if you love me you will feed me, I love you.
I pull her forward and grab her hair and I pull her outside of herself, a shell made of flesh and blood and a bone or two, and her spine is like a notched roller coaster and I pinch the skin at the sides of her ladder-scaped sky and I tear her out and I say yes, yes, I promise you this, and I take it up and I slice her all into shreds and she is crying and I am saying yes, yes, this is all yours, if you promise me you love me I will stop, I will stop if you stop first, and she doesn't.
She cries on my hips and bleeds all the way down my thighs and I scoop her up and lick her temples and I create staircases and ribbons with my spit on the sides of her face and I say listen, listen, I love you, I mean this, speak to me, respond. She doesn't.
o. My mother cries when I come home and try to wash off my hands in the sink.
She says oh Tommy, oh Tommy, oh Tommy you didn't, and I brush them off on my jeans and I go outside to lay on the porch and the stars are like beads of sweat tripping down off of God's shiny forehead, and I reach all the way up to slap His cheeks and His sky eyes and His poached mouth, and mother sits down next to me with her legs like little stubs. She is frail underneath His eyebrows and He touches her with glowing fingers, splaying moonlight on her face.
She starts to speak of him and his big loves and his golden heart and she asks if she can see my hand and I grab her by the wrist and I tell her just like him, just like him, and I take that skin there and I want to peel it all the way off. I curl up my fingers and I find that her skin is tougher than it looks, and I thrust myself inside, burrowing my fists inside her skin, pressing into her back, pushing into her breastbone, and she yells, screams, and I rip her open and she spills out like a plastic bag of melted ice and thinning water, whore, I think, whore.
I say you never stopped him, and she says I meant to, and I pry her all the way open, cleaved, a ham on the inside, and I say not once.
She is all alone on the inside, a second shadow, a crystal coated in red and white and I cannot break through her, and I want to send her up to the salty sweaty tears of God and I yell this is not Heaven, this is not Heaven, and that is a promise, and I twist her all up inside and I say just like Dad, and she cries, oh my Tommy, oh my Tommy, you didn't.
I did.
u. He tells me I am a little car. He drives into me.
He fucks me once, twice, seven times, and I am pressing my forehead into the wall and he is yelling in my ear and there is blood on my face and I reach up and my face is clear, all just skin, and I try to tear it away but I am a child ripping at plastic, and he fucks me and I can feel it all the way inside, extending into my core and sitting on my heart, a weight leaning down and pressing into my fingers.
He drives me and honks my horn and pounds on the wheel and I scream and I want to scream and I do and there is a smeared piece of flesh against my lips and I bite and I bite and I tell him that I am sorry, I am sorry, I am so sorry, and there is the sound of shattered glass and there is something buried inside of my palm.
I open my eyes to tell God that there is something inside of me and I am made of one thousand tiny shivering stars naked up in the sky and trying to cover themselves with protective swathes of night, and I lift my eyes and I say I love you, and I am sorry, so sorry.
He says crash, my little car, explode.
y. I have killed:
-one boy, nine-years-old, snowflakes and mountains and skyscrapers in his head, his feet bare and his skin pale; broke into his house, entered, hid by the stairs; raped him on the hardwood floor; cut off his feet, fed them to the stove, hungry for days.
-one girl, fifteen-years-old, locked inside my room for six weeks; shoved my fist inside her mouth, spoke to the cobwebs inside of her ears, made love to her, loved her; skinned her alive, kept the remains inside my bed, a keeper.
-one woman, forty-nine-years-old, her hair all gray and her skin made of rips and corners; spilled her tears, spilled her blood; beat her to death, January night, twelve-thirty-five a.m.; scooped her up and made her into ground, a prostitute for the dirt.
-one man, fifty-one-years-old, naked; brutally castrated, his penis pinned to the wall, a walking living pulsing pounding slapping bloodstain; semen dripped all over his forehead, a giant hole in his back, an angry claw-fist wound, a little tumbling explosion begging for his life.
-someone else, a man with tits, a flat-chested woman, a sack of fat and a mucked-up skeletal whore; old, aged, skin like crumpled paper; young, youthful, black and sandpaper, teeth rotting outside, a fat shiny grin, red dribbled all the way down, a tear and rip at the mouth; a name, a scar, a shedding on the headstone, a smiling gray beast, a looming hand of God, a planted shiny devil-tooth; someone I do not recognize.
Wait, I say, I know you, I know you, this other one I murdered, this other victim, this vanished friend and this decimated rival; and I read, aloud, my voice choppy glass: Tommy, it reads. Tommy.
I am a little car, buzzing down the sidewalk, his boots tripping in the snow, stars glancing at him unevenly, the skin of animals inside my palms as I shut my mouth and open my ears and I stare, and I say: I like smoke, I like to hurt animals and insects, I like to murder, I like to maim and injure, I like to swallow and I like to spit, I like you and I like me and I hate everyone else, but you're safe, you're safe from me, I will never hurt you again.
Fallen angel,cast out of heaven.
