Within me I harbor a deep unforgivable empathy for Jeffrey Dahmer

and a cognizance of how such stilted alienation could so wickedly labor

when a wound drinks itself into homicidal solipsism and builds a throne

out of utopian skulls in a downmarket Wisconsin living room. I know the

blood of the life of the jilted mind, I know how to make the misery a kingdom

this dark magic, this negative power, is forged in lonely ambles through the

catacombs of propriety—influence unearned but achieved by toxic hazing

a rented room, a sick alley, the dark corners of an unwholesome club, there I

am, with you, drilling a tiny hole into your brain, trying to make you into

something I can finally control, a zombie, the only being I believe I can love.

Come back to my place with me for beer and company, gore like chocolate

hot sperm crying down the brown nudity of a corpse: unhouseled, lessening.

Skin dissolves in acid, bones by a sledgehammer are crushed into powder

what I can take as the evidence of my capacity I will enshrine with laurels

or gaudy spray paint, but the proof of my hunger and my failure must be

disposed of in simmering barrels, tucked underground, inside recesses, flushed

down the toilet, the hair sealed in bags, each lip eaten—penises separated.

A rabid beast stalks down the main avenue of this pathetic town and citizens

cower in buses and behind the smudged glass of public foyers. No disaster

is as complete as the gorgeousness of my imagined dominion, I will destroy

in my small reality what you could never possibly begin to fashion and in

doing so in my kitchen, through evil experiments, I have made this part of

my fascination something to be reckoned with and in sharing it with you

we’re alive, famous, full of light. We kill what we can in our own way

we live and kill what we can (because otherwise there’s never any chance).

I yearn, and I want to be touched, and to love, but worlds won’t have me

when the lightening shoots out of the emperor’s hands—it’s only a movie.