Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
This attention-grabbing line immediately pulls the reader into the world of the poem and into the speaker's mental universe. It ensures that the poem is not driven by suspense—from the very first sentence, readers are told exactly how things will end, and the speaker's increasing violence is not a surprise. Instead, what makes the work compelling is the chilling candidness of the speaker. Despite his delusional sense of self, he has no illusions about his own violence. Moreover, it is clear that his killing is premeditated and completely free of motive in any conventional sense, since he aims to kill "anything" rather than a particular person.
I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
The line "I see that it is good" is an allusion to the Bible, and specifically to the moment at which God creates the world and "saw that it was good." With this reference, Duffy sardonically emphasizes the speaker's conviction that he is like God (or at least that he can "play God"). For the speaker, however, godlike power is oriented around destruction rather than creation. The ability to make people and animals disappear and to snuff out life fills the speaker with a sense of agency that he otherwise lacks. This moment in the text is simultaneously ironic, referencing the speaker's outsize ego, and non-ironic, since by deciding who lives and who dies he does in fact assume a godlike power.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.
The poem's final line is shocking in part because of the use of the second person. Suddenly, the reader is involved in the speaker's plans as his unknowing victim. At the same time, these lines depict an unprecedented moment of human connection for the speaker, who until now has been isolated. His actual address of another person, which suggests that he is able to see them (if only momentarily) as an equal, is both potentially redeeming and quite dark: it hints that he can experience connection only through brutality. Furthermore, the language of these last lines, in particular "I touch your arm," is reminiscent of romance and love stories. For the speaker, this moment is a romance of sorts, making it all the more disturbing.
