Three reasons to go insane that cannot
hear my thoughts, so I suffer. The quietly
cracking cornerstone I am that had you
only been someone else, housebroken
and shown concern over the bills, the
dishes, the niggles that sum to torture, I
might live as happily. Instead I am ash
circulating inside a diseased skull.

This ecological disaster is my polite
chagrin, your detergent deterrent. Furry
growths, off-black water standing rancid
where the sink should be, pneumatic
pounding sounding like music but shite:
our bestiary of pollution. In this beggar’s
mansion a freegan could live in opulence
on the food that wasn’t good enough.

It started like fireworks on Remembrance
Day; shamed in sympathy I withdrew to
my role as your A to Z. Mate, you try to
talk, I part with a dictionary response. If I
had the power of speech I would let you
know how you don’t care, you don’t think,
you don’t seem to know that life is hard,
why, why, why are you always there?

He is sitting in the dark wearing earplugs.
His hands are rigid on the guitar that
belongs to his first victim, who arrives
home after a night out, climbs the stairs,
exposes the back of his skull...

A striking morning echoes with the
contrast of silence, and I am the first to
arise from where I am loved: I dream as a
virtuoso on a versatile instrument, playing
a lullaby’s concussion with violent
percussion. Rest in peace is a hazy thrill
and too brief: here their shrieking
playtime makes me claustrophobic.

Like a villain in a private comic, I
pronounce your death in my head:
prepare to meet the landlord in the sky,
we have exhausted every curtain, time to
take the rubbish out etcetera. Maybe I
envy you, being unburdened by guilt or
empathy. Maybe you envy me too for my
ability to sleep through anything.

His second victim had prepared a line of
ketamine in the kitchen. After the party,
he found it, alone, and with quick stoney
purpose clutching caustic drain cleaning
powder the dope was duped...

Days are fragile when my food plans are
ruined by missing eggs, a culture of mould
on the sideboard, that phlegmy smoker’s
cough so disgusting; irritating to the day
you burn us down. Surely you noticed the
humour in our vapid meetings dying, the
walls between us multiplying and the
central heating boiler always firing?

He thought he was dreaming that night of
strange terror when she set off the fire
alarm. He wasn’t, and now, adrenaline
pumping reality in, the darkness shrinking,
blind spot diminishing, stark consciousness

is filling his hands outstretched throttling:
there the ragdoll victim with real eyes, he
understands but too late, stands in fear of
dreams that come true, standing still with
nothing to love but alone at last with hate.

I am a broken bottle, jags exposed at last.
It’s quiet now and therefore worse. Every
day my neighbour slams his door without
thought and the way the walls smell is
getting to me. There is a voice that almost
coincides with the movement of my lips.
It is plaintive and obnoxious. I avoid
mirrors for unknown angry days.

They found four bodies.

Author's note:  This is about me murdering my flatmates in my sleep.  Let me assure you, these murders are fictional. 
I wasn't sure about sharing this, because it's quite personal.  But then all my poems are quite personal and it hasn't stopped me before.  Someone might get a voyeuristic kick out of it. 
I can't take credit for the idea of the second murder, I stole that from Kurt Vonnegut.