A.G. Price, “Beast

Beast

A.G. Price

You will not find me in the industrialized, bureaucratic, banality of the Holocaust, or in hospitalized death penalty chambers equipped with audience seating behind one-way mirrored, double-thick glass.

Nor will you find me in satellite linked situation rooms discussing kill lists by way of videoconferencing, or seated in remote control command centers launching Hell-Fire missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles.

You certainly won’t find me in Wall Street boardrooms where bloodless, bottom line, collateral killers in suits decide every day who will live and who will die relative to quarterly dividends.

No, I occupy and ooze out of handkerchiefs secretly tucked away in duffle bags aboard military transports winging their way from the desert’s storm to trophy cases housed in dimlylit suburban man caves.

I rest in pieces: severed heads and hands, mutilated genitals stuffed in the mouths of fallen horse soldiers on the banks of the Little Bighorn.

I am the shriveled, blood-matted scalp of Yellow Hair dangling from the neck of Buffalo Bill Cody cantering his mount under the big top, a ghastly ornament admired by the crowned heads of Europe and the Czar of Russia.

I am savagery at its most elemental root ripping the putrid flesh of hypocrisy from sanitized, televised, and monetized killing. I am the beast of vengeance tugging at its chains. I am the beast found in every human heart.