Wrath, wrath

I need a body. There always has to be a body. A lamb, a son, a first-born, a wide-eyed stupid thing with its lovely hands and open mouth, its tender, blinking obedience. I feel like you now, Father, I need a body to pay for every single way I’ve been wronged, offended, and fooled. Something meaty I can cast my wrath onto, flesh I can wring dry of blood and life. Let the punishment eclipse the crime. Let it be excruciating.

Sometimes, hunger sharpens the senses. But this kind—a hunger with no mouth that will chew itself raw—does not make you keener. It makes you mean. It lures out cruelty, that dragon with red-hot skin from a cave more ancient than anger or grief or sorrow, older than your Adam’s Adam. Better to reign in hell—it’s wrath that no longer wants to be understood, it wants to be felt. I want to know if it hurts.

That body, that believer, frater meus on his knees, begging, shaking, I never wanted to be like him, I wanted to BE him. BRUTUS! BRUTUS! BRUTUS! the town cheers as my brother’s blood cries out from the ground, as I make Rome greater than he ever has. I am Aeneas, I am Cain, I am Pilate, I am Lucifer glaring through tears, I am Victor Frankenstein in his attic laboratory, feverish and doomed, staring down at what he has made, and oh how I loathe it, loathe you, you despicable miserable ugly thing—how I loathe myself in you.

I am Cronus chewing, crunching, and swallowing his children, acidic flame on tongue burning the roof of my mouth. It’s wrath that rises so suddenly it steals the breath from the lungs, so violent it’s almost pleasure, so absolute it’s almost love. This is wrath that belongs to the body, that owns the body, that turns every nerve into a live wire. This is hydrogen fusion before the supernova. The hands tremble, the throat tightens, the vision sharpens into something crystalline and now the whole world is sulfuric at the edges, Enola Gay over Hiroshima, Genghis Khan at Nishapur, Ares pulsing with bad, bad intentions.

In a second, it will all be over. Shechem, circumcised, then slaughtered. Clementia, lost. Stone by stone, I will win back the Lord’s favor with deep-violet hued justice. Wrath, wrath, my lamb is not the first and he won’t be the last. Father will see, Father will hear, Father will know, Father will care. I am an appetite, so when you feed the sparrows next time, Father, don’t forget about me, and please stop me, because I will do it all over again.

With great rhetoric,