A man kills someone he has loved for ten years. Their familiar saying was “I’d give you the shirt off my back,” a phrase of total loyalty, yet one moment of rage ends it all. The killer weeps over the body and seems genuinely sorry, but the act cannot be undone. The speaker is not just telling a story; he is left in a kind of dazed sorrow, asking strange, unanswerable questions about the red sun and the tumbling moon. The repetition of “tumbling” feels like a mind spiraling after violence. The mood is intimate and haunted—close love turns suddenly deadly, and the final line makes that danger feel personal and still possible: “I’ll kill you if my head goes wrong.” It is a bleak, uneasy meditation on how thin the line between devotion and destruction can be.
Hate — Summary
One man killed another. The saying between them had been " I'd give you the shirt off my back." The killer wept over the dead. The dead if he looks back knows the killer was sorry. It was a shot in one second of hate out of ten years of love. Why is the sun a red ball in the six o'clock mist? Why is the moon a tumbling chimney ? . . . tumbling . . . tumbling . . . " I'd give you the shirt off my back" . . . And I'll kill you if my head goes wrong.