the freak carried a worn bone handled knife in his back pocket and thought of himself as a snake with a single tooth.

 

filled with a constant sense of amazement at the human fear of wierdness, he aligned himself with the cold blooded, beings like himself in desperate need of the suns caress.. and so he would lie, a literal man, he would

lie under the sun and feel its warmth pouring through his naked skin and soaking into the earth beneath him..

 

the light worked like a soothing oil, setting his muscle on fire. His heart which in the night felt cold as stone, would begin  to draw upon life, would hum like a generator and white current, white light would begin a steady pulse in his mind

 

he belived in part, that humanity was in denial, that they were closer to the snake, cold blooded and it seemed that his brothers and sisters, so quick to pelt him with rocks, had forgotten their own beginnings, had begun to cleave to death

 

imagine being in love with death, how absurd, but still, they lapped at its blood red waters like mothers milk

 

..oh the sun and the sky that you have given up

 

i am a father of all snakes he thought and with this in mind he was in the habit of scouring the parks and the wild places of the city

 

he made for himself a bed of serpents for though he was cold inside, still, he was warmer than they and they wrapped themselves together with him to dream the quiet dead thoughts of sleep

 

he philosophised about human poison, saw it inside his heart in luminous shades of death, saw bear like men inject their children behind the neck until they were paralyzed in age with a frost in their blood, saw mothers with swelling poison hearts break children like wooden toys, discard them to the floor

 

deadly poisons..

 

2

 

..the freak had powerful arms for a reason. his method of hunting. he'd climb up into the overlapping branches of the trees with a careful sloth-like lope & drop down onto his prey. With his trunk like arms he'd crush their bones until the blood shot from their mouths. He favored raw flesh.

 

his disposition was perfectly neutral, such that one day he would chew on a deer, the next on the tanned body of a hiker. His palette tended towards young meat, but for variation he would single out a geriatric from the gardens of a rest home, scrubbing at the meat to remove the stink of talcum powder & dark pharmacuticals..