Oh the pain,

What fantastic pleasure,

What life-giving fucking ecstasy.

Blood pumps past my ears to the ball of hate in between. The animal in there snarls and bites but I wipe the blood from my lips and get up. I tried to spit a tooth out, but instead I dribble out shattered fragments of my head.

I got back up.

I fucking got back up.

He was fist bumping his friends as I staggered. I tried to summon words and found only blood. I wiped again, red streaks on the back of my arm. As the blood dried it pulled the hairs from their roots, one by one. A whisper of pain against the roar of the rest.

“You want more?” He yelled. His neutered jackals laughed as their Mussolini flexed. I knew I could die today, I knew he didn’t care. He walks back over to me like his dick is scraping the floor: one half menace, the other creatine.

Me: “Yes Please”

See, he has this moment of lovely doubt. He sees something in me, he sees that whatever pain I’m in is pale and wrinkled in comparison to what’s left under my fingernails.

Blood, left long enough, passes well for dirt.

I stare him down for a beat before his sleeve-lacking lackeys egg him on. “Fuck him up” they say, like I don’t want to get fucked. “Kill the Faggot” they say, like I’ve never tried

“Come on!” I’d already swallowed or spat the blood so the only thing left in my throat was grit. I beckoned him forward, “Let’s get my dick hard”

“Oh, you like this, freak?” His veiny satellites jeer and he laughs. I was back in the schoolyard, gravel in my knees and filled with spite. Here is my revenge.

I dribble out another bloody fragment of tooth that had dislodged itself from my gums. So I told him: “Let’s turn this into a hate crime”

And boy, did we.

Three minutes or an hour went by. He only lasted a few more punches before he resorted to kicking me, curled on the pavement. I think I took the punches better than he did.

But soon they got bored.

They always do.

They walked away thinking they’d won.

The entire world soon shrunk to contain only me, my pain, and a night sky that stretched from the roof of one building to another. Stars outnumbered by blinking planes.

Pain shot up my side, blinking planes now outnumbered by swimming static. It took a second before I realized: thats what laughing feels like now.

The moment wasn’t lost on me.

This is my revenge against the world. My first and final act of retribution. This is how I get out of bed, this is how I will myself to live. Bloody and beaten, too tired beyond my years with still too little of my life lived.

I stood the fuck up.

I stood up, and I staggered the fuck away.