Sonnet [Explicit]

“Hold him still, now” The Vet instructed the hands holding me down as he inspected my genitals with a gentle hand.  “These tools you gave me are barely practical as it is.  We don’t want him struggling and making the incision ragged.”

“Shut yer fuckin mouth and get on with it.” Pooch hissed.  “I only got us thirty minutes ’til the guards come back.”
My spread-eagled limbs struggled with everything they had as The Vet reached for the makeshift scalpel they’d improvised from a toothbrush and razor, but I couldn’t move a muscle.  Nine inmates held me down better than any restraints could have: two to a limb, Pooch at my head, pulling down on either cheek, knuckles white with the grip they maintained on the sock-and-soap gag in my mouth.
I was helpless as a puppy, which incidentally were once The Vet’s bread and butter, literally.  He’d been sectioned indefinitely fourteen years ago for waging a war of castration on canines and their owners.  Well, before he moved onto eating them of course.  All based on a hatred of dog-shit.  Fucking psycho.  But, psycho or not, he’d found a place here acting as makeshift doctor to the murderers, rapists, paedophiles and serial killers that called A-Wing home.
That a collection of souls such as these hated me enough to put differences aside and work together for my torture was a kind of honour, I thought to myself as I felt a rubber band tighten around me.  “No it fucking isn’t,” my brain gibbered back at me, “They’re about to take your nutsack you twat!”
It was all poetry’s fault.  Everything had been fine before the poetry.  Sometime back in the Noughties I'd been shopping for a Mother's Day card in Tesco, gradually becoming more and more appalled at the endless cliches masquerading as affection. It was clear any old tosh would do, as long as it rhymed.  Did people even read them?
At that point in time I'd just completed a community poetry course for the unemployed  at the local library and was confident I could do a much better job than anything I saw in front of me.  Full of ideas, I went straight home and started looking up greetings card companies looking for submissions.  It would be easy money, I'd write something truly heartfelt, something meaningful, superior, something that would make the masses weep as they read it and love each other anew.  I'd make a million enriching other people's lives, healing divides, teaching others to express love, making special occasions memorable.
That was the idea. I decided to focus on Valentines cards.  I wrote a series of sonnets about the eternal nature of love.  I received a rejection letter saying people didn't want sonnets in Valentines cards.  I wrote a collection of Valentine Haikus and received a reply that Haikus were not marketable.  I tried every form I knew, trying to raise the standard and understanding of verse in the nation's platitudes.  I was rejected at every turn.
Finally I began to mimick the god-awful shit I read in the shops.  I turned off my heart and wrote by rote, empty meaningless drivel that meant nothing, expressed nothing.  The first check arrived a month later.  That's when I realised: Love does not exist.
Love is learned.  A conditioned fairy tale we tell ourselves to mask want, desire, need, lust, aggression.  I 'Loved' the poems I cared about.  But they'd been rejected just the same as I'd always been by girls since my teenage years.  They just didn't understand 'Love' the way I did.  They rejected it and chose empty verse the same way they chose moronic bullies to snog instead of those who truly cared about them.
I was enraged.  How?  How could this DRIVEL sell when my heartfelt efforts had failed?  Who chose THIS over ME?
I decided to find out.  It wasn't much work to find out which stores stocked my cards.  One of them was hiring. When they found out I wrote some of the cards myself, the job was mine.  Slowly, slowly I began to identify the cretins who bought my poems, recognize them, learn their features, their lines.  I hope you'll understand why I focussed on the pretty girls.
I began to frequent bars around town on Friday nights, identifying my customers as they got more and more drunk.  When the opportunity arose, I took my chances.  I always left their bodies with a real poem, a heartfelt one, written only for them though I didn't know their names.  I learned those later, in the paper.
They caught me fairly quickly I suppose.  I left enough clues and, CCTV being what it is and all... I like to think I taught some of them at least something about love before...
Anyway, that's what sent me here, to this cell. Fourteen victims, the same as lines in a sonnet.  I wrote one line in remembrance of each of them: my greatest love poem.  I doubt it will ever be published.  Just a shame one of their surnames was 'Pooch'