And would it not be? The more I ravage about, the more they rave about me. The more I destroy, the more they deify me. The more I crush them, the more they crave. For Me. For Me. For Me. I am the Emperor of Ruins, I survey all that I have destroyed, I live in a garden redolent with the fragrance of flowers gone to rust. I cannot make it worse, and yet nobody can so much as touch me. It’s just the way it is, I have become the UntouchableOne, the UnputdownableOne. What would you put me down for, anyhow? There’s nothing to be gained. All is now lost. I saw to it, that’s the job you gave me and I grabbed it with both hands and a dagger. I plunged it everywhere. Everything bleeds, and the blood feeds everything.

Just look around me, around this splendour of my conjuring, this splendoured desolation where nothing needs no more to be done because all of it is done. To dust. There is no more to be done. This place is to be the end of all places. This place is where I had set out to reach. This is the place from where there is no going on, nowhere to go. Such is the place I command. Like a King with a kingdom of the dead and the done.

It’s where I flourish and nobody else, for it is all for me and not for you. I step out and I see everything wilted but me. That’s how it should be. If you do not wilt, you shall rise. And if you rise, you shall become to me what I do not wish you to become to me: a challenge.
What part did you have in it? It is the part you shall one day regret. You chose. What part do you still have in it? Hmm. But you have a part. Your part is to wilt, and wither away so I may have sway. Your part is to hail or be hastened to your end. For there is no provision left for any other part. This garden, you see, is the garden of graves; I told you everything has been done.

To dust. Or done in. Seek out your part, the part of you that remains. I didn’t bother putting names down, I am sorry, but there were so many of you. Too much work. There is too much else I need to attend to. More of you. That’s what. That’s who. I say all is done, and then there is more to be done. I contradict myself, but if I do not contradict myself how am I doing to you what I am doing to you when I had vowed only to do for you? But you won’t understand, you dunces. I never trusted you would. That’s the trust I rode all the way here, the trust of dunces, or the trust that dunces will be dunces.

For every rusted rose in this garden I possess a less rusted one whose task it is to tell upon the more rusted one. And learning from the less rusted ones, I turn upon the more rusted ones. And then the less rusted ones turn more rusted and there are more less rusted ones and so, on and on. So on and on this goes on, this flourished garden of mine that I keep famished. Because when you bleed, it feeds my greed. And shall I tell you what that greed makes me want to do? Something has to be done with it because there are masses of it, the greed, and it cannot just be washed down the sink or that other thing with a gurgling orifice at the bottom of it. The greed needs attention and action. It needs to be exhausted for it to be done. And so would you be interested to know what I do with it? I shall cut you and hang you out to dry. And when that drying has happened, years and all, I shall come to shed the final drops on your cortège. Live. Televised. Tears of Blood. Thereupon I shall command the gardeners to commence their jobs — planting and plucking and pruning and cutting and casting away. So this place may prosper anew in the silence of its debacles and turn an even more uproarious celebration of unspeakable tragedy. Upon which I shall chisel an epitaph:

And the cry rose
But I am the real rose
And that may make me curious
Rose, might you just be spurious.