I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.
I choose to live and to
Lie, kill and give and to
Die, learn and love and to
Do what it takes to step through.

See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me.
Soften this old armor.
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side.
Step into the shadow.
Forty six and two are just ahead of me.

You’re a god damn fool, boy, if you think I am going to let it be that easy on you. You see, You’re a fucking freak. You’re a freak for the pain and, well, god damn boy, I always told you…you’re too fucking soft to be a man

It’d been two long days. I didn’t go home, I didn’t go to the club. I stayed on the streets. It was too much. It heaved me. Girls raped, girls beaten, girls impregnated. My pain changed me, theirs dragged me into the shit with them.

I was having what we’ll call a weak moment. My eyes were heavy and scratchy, my body was shaking, I was pissing in alleys, people might think I was drunk, but I wasn’t in a traditional sense. I burned up on the inside. I had a fever. My body was reacting with antibodies to exhaustion to pain. I was the kind of guy that had a scab and I’d pick it to watch it bleed. I couldn’t not stick my finger in a hole, I couldn’t not push further to something else.

If you read back on Manson’s memoirs, on Koresh’s….which I’d done in prison, there was a long there about their growth period. There was a period of time where, instead of learning to share with everyone, they wore it all on themselves. Nobody ever got it right the first time I guess. You had to break a couple eggs. I hadn’t slept because all I could see was what the girls had told me. I could only feel what they told me they felt. Their pain had consumed me. The strength to reach out and prop them up meant a transference of energy from them onto my shoulders.

You’ll never be as strong as me boy…you’ll never run your shit, you’re a broken little bitch boy. Couldn’t handle what we taught you, how to be a fucking man. Bet you don’t even have your pubes yet, or you shave them to look like the little girl you are….why don’t you cut yourself again and make yourself cry, you girl? You fucking girl…

I was ahead of the old bastard. My palms , my forearms were covered in blood. I bled the soft smiles and promises I made to people I barely knew. I oozed the chaos that I prevented. It lived in my pores and it had to come out. The gashes were big, rudimentarily tied off with pieces of a torn shirt, blood soaked, eventually a hospital would be needed…until then…

Crouching in the alley, I shivered, my body cold. I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t go to campus, it was too much, my body was covered in shit, smeared in the shit of others. I was the garbage man, I was the janitor…

One week before. Sitting in the club listening to a story of police rape, police brutality, I was consumed with rage…I was broken to it, I felt the cock of the officer shoved in my ass with each word, I could smell my blood and shit. I heard the grunts and moans as they were explained to me. I smelled my Father’s cologne, I smelled booze. He was a cop, he was my father, he was her rapist.

I was the hand of vengeance. I was retribution wrapped in flesh. I was undead and didn’t matter. I was acceptable losses to my own cause.

It would take time before I learned to sacrifice others, to trust them to die. I still cared too much. I could not ask such sacrifice yet. Until then….I dialed 911 and called in a robbery. I waited for the officer. It took 5 hours.

Meditation requires the absence of thought, so I cannot call those 5 hours some sort of Zen trance, but they were, the very definition, of pre-meditation. I visualized my goal, I was spirit walked to the end of being. I saw every angle. The man who walked in had no chance. I simply swung a baseball bat and watched him go cold to the floor. I closed the doors of Purgatory and turned on the red neon lights, locking the doors as I went, whistling quietly.

Atta boy….show me some balls, show me you dropped, be a man, son…

I slammed him into the bar until he woke. I screamed into his face. I cried on him. My hands were the hands of revenge. They were the angry gods of karmic justice. They fed on his flesh, his blood. They were divine weapons, they were blessed. God could never fight a war without an avenging angel, someone willing to be cast out and fight their way back in. I was the chosen one. I would return with my flock.

His face was hamburger. Eye sockets in pieces, nose bloody and open. I made him admit to his sins, none of which, were the cause of my moment with him. He was representative of something evil, of a badge and pain. He would be a message to his brethren, he would be a work of art, he would be beautiful again, I would redeem him, every gash, every bloody bruise, was a signal for him to come to the light, to repent, to give in to me, to share with me….He could learn to love again, to love me and those around him, he could protect again, to fulfill his dream before he was infected. I was cleansing him with every lovely stroke of my swollen and split hands into his face, my tears pittered down on his skin, to bless him. He was a soldier unwillingly in a war he didn’t understand. I made him understand.

He told me about rape, about corruption. He told me about filth and anger. He told me about his own destruction, about his desire to be safe, how he had lost himself to false dreams, false beliefs of those around him. The false idols of a devil. His order was chaos, his power was greed.

I could feel my knees sink into his shoulders, I rose above him, pinning his dilapidated body to the bar of Purgatory, and I let him bleed on it. I called him my father. I was no longer myself, I was something far worse, far suppressed. I was an army of invisible, I was Aisling, I was Xiu, I was Ava, I was Izzy, I was the pain I saw in the barista’s eyes, I was the sadness of the broken boy in a fight, the eyes of a homeless woman, the struggle of the beaten gang initiate. They held my arms and flung them into him, because they were not strong enough. They helped me. I was guided, they were angels.

It was exhausting in all the right ways, it destroyed me and it bled me, it eclipsed me in a warm cocoon of violence and pain. I felt to my knees as his body crumbled next to me, he was me, I was vomiting, I looked at him and saw Sunday afternoons after church. Every man becomes his father…

I looked up and saw the blonde vixen, my puppy, she stood and watched, she was confused and aroused, she was reaching out, she was wet and I could smell her. She tried to make it better, she tried to calm me. I simply wept more. I was vulnerable, I was the man on the ground, but I was much younger. She spoke into the cavern of thoughts and pain and brought out the man that waited , chained to a pole in the back of my mind, handcuffed and bound, the man who wanted more. She spoke and pulled him in….

Every man wants a woman like his mother.