Urge

Kill

Stop

Saying that

Word

Never

I would never

I will never

Take what isn’t mine

Steal it

Maim it

Cut throats

End lives

Not right to kill wrong not right

You must be spared because I cannot do it

Alone

None of us should we

All have a right to live

Life is sacred, I read in some book I liked but

Did not understand

The land this world occupies belongs to all

Of us

or

At least most

Of us

Even those

Of us

Who have nothing left but

A little life

That book I read says

We shalt not

We are not

allowed, they say it said not

To kill

Meaning, that is,

To remove any inhabitant on the basis

Of hate

That is wrong

It isn’t right

I already said that and

Meant it

By the way, I

Possess no weapons, I

Will never own one with

A very sharp edge

A heavy metal head

A very heavy, pointed, point

Some things are

Impossible for me

I said, and say loudly

I shall not.

However

Some things are

Subject to change

Peace and war, for

Example

A bad example, but

Obviously true

You would

You should never be attacked

For your sins

This has been clearly affirmed

The words are on paper

And yet somewhere there was a warning

And so

We came to know, crying

You deserved to die

From the moment you were born

You emerged wrong and from that

Dark

Crooked

Twisted

Uterine hole

Distorted beyond words and belief

Already

You were wrong and you know the world

Didn’t want you

Didn’t you know

What a monstrous mistake you were

How monstrous

You weren’t alone

How could we ever understand

The truth of that (at the time)

Of you

Kill you she should have thought, but didn’t

Carve you up into insane

Drops of humanity

When all you needed was

A mother’s useless love but

You were insanity

Swaddled in something

You didn’t deserve

[I cannot tell you why]

Oh I could kill you

Not softly

Not with a song

Nobody ever sang to you

But somebody, at some point,

Should have held out a knife don’t

Look away don’t expect music

Stars

Chocolate or

Granite

Don’t think

We have bad aim and

We can’t read

You can’t sing

My tongue has no notes for you

Just ropes that hang before your eyes

Watching waiting knowing

I hope you think

They’re swinging

Only for you

Oh they are oh I could kill you

This is what I do best

My musical skill may be

Noteless

Sharp

So far off-key

So fine and sure

It’ll break you

Before it slices you up down

Wherever you like

Inside and out

But I don’t like this

Killing field

Choeung Ek

Far away and forgotten

But not by the dead and napalm scarred

I’ll not survive the evil I feel

Still you breathe and I need

The original knife, better than a bomb

[anything is better than a bomb]

There is a call to arms that must be answered

It is simple:

You must be dismembered and your signature erased

The task is not that simple

First I must crack you, your bones, your skeleton

Not your kisses which are piss and nonexistent

I cannot do this

I must

Save the pieces of us that are left

But I cannot do this alone I need help here is help:

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,

The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.

Sympathetically I observe

The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating

What a strain it is to be evil.

Says Bertold Brecht and I have to agree

Mask and gold, yes, swollen with

Blood running through the mind looking to kill

The first innocent it finds (please, not Japanese)

Anne Sexton, like many women, is

More generous with evil

I disagree with her about evil seekers

Some are born lucky

Others are born evil

They learn nothing

They just are that way

We are born with luck

which is to say with gold in our mouth.

…

we are born and that ought to be enough,

we ought to be able to carry on from that

but one must learn about evil,

learn what is subhuman,

learn how the blood pops out like a scream,

one must see the night

before one can realize the day,

…

But even in a telephone booth

evil can seep out of the receiver

and we must cover it with a mattress,

and then tear it from its roots

and bury it,

bury it.

I do agree you need to be buried

With no marker for the stain you are

You

Creator of hate

Eraser of candles

Mangler of morals

Too hollow to stand

Alone

And here I am alone with this all, this mess you are, this damned spot you are, with this wanting I have for your obliteration to happen. Knowing only my hands can do what needs to be done, what I hate having to do but must do. No list of words, no collection of angry ideas, can remove you. No poem, no story, no novel is enough to replace the gouges you have made in minds and bodies. No knives, swords, machine guns, no rabid screams will ever turn you into a puddle of blood, because you were more than that horrid carcass of an infant spat out by a woman who didn’t deserve to live: you were an infection, a contamination, something worse than a novel spawned by some writer from Maine who looked in your mirror and gasped: “No! No more!” You have destroyed the concept of good and evil, the possibility of hope, maybe even the hope we might still have of burying you. Sorry, Anne, your poem is too optimistic. It’s not that the damage has been done, but that there has been no damage at all. We have met the underbelly and we now know what we are. We can, I can, destroy the source of the evil, but as Walt Kelly’s Pogo observes, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

We are not worth saving, or killing, it would seem.