Where were you at the first breath of heaven? When the wicked light exploded and all the days to that hour were blazed into nothing? When the fires scorched the firmament and all was shrouded in dust? Where were you in the ravaging, in the annihilation?

I will tell you. You waited in the flickering before consciousness, and when all compressed into light, and when the skies yawned—

Perhaps some awkward god said your name and this sin bore the din of becoming?

Once freed, did you slaughter the heavens? Did you grab the stars by their throats? Did you wear the skins of dead galaxies? Did your eyes and blood and lips blaze with impossible fury when you were only mist and light and dust?

And what did you know as you drifted through time, when all eternity was scorched and uncoiling? Did you know the passing of moments when there were no suns to register the days? Can a monster age when there is no flesh to wither? When there are no cells to die?

O, to know you in the flight of ash into ash, until mists gathered with the redness of the sun, until worlds hurtled into one and burned? O your teeth alone, shining with the radiation, rusted in the ancient redness, dripping with blood before the advent of blood.

Where were you when the collisions coalesced? When molten spheres blackened, flared, drifted and circled? What sounds did you know in the voice of the whirlwind? What names were you called by the voice of static? Where were you in the building of the foundation? Where were you when all the sons of God were born and named, when they called out in their chorus? Were you stalking the land? Were you battering the world to come? Do you call the sons in their robes and make them to wander in your shade? Did you force them to pleasure themselves in your black? Did you stamp them into the depths of your soil?

You did.

How the heavens must have wept to look upon you. How they must have yearned to know you again.

Did you build the shape of man into the rocks, to know the joy of murdering him? Did you ferment the first soil with the bones and bodies of your construction? Did you stack the lands with death even before the first life? And in the hours until the first victim staggered forth from the seas, did you wander the crimson lands, peer into the halls of death and mourn the vacant corridors? Did you tread the distant deeps and shout your name into that terrible emptiness? All the barren earth must have seemed a cemetery in need of corpses.

You must have tilled the soil in search of green life yet un-sprouted. O you must have begged the skies for the advent of flesh.

You must have plucked your own ribs from your own meat and cast these to the dust. You must have watered them with your blood. You must have given them names. You must have bid them grow and breathe. You must have said, “Father, make for me a help meet so I may kill him.”

And when still no symptom of life from the flesh, how madness was given dominion in the world. What horrors blazed in your skull? What terrors pulsed your veins, engorged your vessels? What awful music thrummed from the furnace of your soul?

And when the first man walked amongst the trees did you make him to wander in your shade? And when he plucked the fruit, did you weep unto him without shame? Yes. You brought unto him the tenderness of your heart. Such was your devotion to the flesh. Yes. And the first murder was born from love.

How you have made up for unused hours. How you have pillaged and slaughtered and dripped and pummeled and gnashed and tore and broken and moaned and crunched and roared and plunged and blazed and sucked and chewed and snarled and hissed and foamed and snapped and stabbed and ripped and sliced and bludgeoned and raped and burned and raved in all the days since.

How you have lit all the nights with the flickering of your soul.