The day Reason was guillotined
in the kingdom known as my mind,
his head flung into the murky sea of oblivion, 
Cruelty became my god.

He has made me invincible, fortifying my soul
against sense and my heart against tenderness.
Judgment was exiled, and with an iron fist
he crushed my eyes so I lost sight of love.

But how he made my blood boil! How he
whipped my soul into such a pure, raging ecstasy!
The sheer pleasure of cruelty, where all the world
seems so ripe and ready to give way

Under my unrelenting hands! The sweet sensation
of flesh crushing under flesh; the shivering of an upper lip;
the burst of tears and a bloodied mouth like fireworks, accompanied
by the high violin climax of a scream…

But what I revel in most of all is a kind of precious pearl
sitting amongst its battered, rotting shell; the treasure
that my god most desires is the single, silent moment,
indiscernible, indescribable, unmistakable, of the breaking

of a heart. When the squirming, cramping red mass
bursts open under a torrent of arrows sent forth by my words;
when tear-drenched eyes give off that most pitiful,
helpless light of loss that simply says “Why?” These moments

send me into such a state of wonder and delight
that I drop down to my knees and break my skull
upon Cruelty’s marble temple floor in supplication
to my god.

The unwiring of sinews, the pleading tears, the tears…

… are my own.