A Systemic Guide To Annihilation

I won't slit your throat.

What am I, a butcher?

I won't break your bones.

What am I, a thug?

I won't take your life.

What am I, the State?

I'll break your nerve.

Your nerves, actually. Plural.

I'll break them like they weren't.

And then I'll let you live.

Because the dead

can't spend the rest of their lives

waking in the middle of the night,

breaking into cold sweat,

wondering when I might return.

I'll leave you alive.

With your pulse intact.

Your doors locked.

Your windows shut.

And that little suspicion that none of it matters.

You'll wake up tomorrow.

Then the day after.

And every morning

will have to explain itself to you.

That's the kind of bastard I am.

Call me cruel.

Call me evil reincarnate.

Call me whatever you like.

The wound doesn't care what you name the knife.

I'm more of a sledgehammer, though.

Knives are too efficient.

They cut quick.

And what cuts quick doesn't cut deep.

A sledgehammer gives every surface

the depth it deserves.

That's how I have always imagined poetic justice;

when you want to plead with all your mouth and all your life for mercy, 

but you have too little left of either. 

If you must know, I take my poetry rather seriously.