Anatomy Is Destiny - Exhumed

In my waxen world, time stands still

Forever frozen like flies trapped in amber

One perfect moment preserved, just ere the kill

Gruesome atrocities transfixed in horror’s chamber

Poetry without motion, figures stranded midstream

Waxen players in this dark drama of the macabre

Mouths agape with terror but breathless to scream

No death rattle heard, nor parting sors…

I am preserver of life through my morbid art

For each mannequin was truly alive from the start

So if the eyes seem to follow your gaze as you gawk

Know that in the eyes of the dead, in their shadow you walk…

Cadavers molded in wax as their lives buried away

More preening puppets to perform in the scenes that I play

Features cast in the moment of dying preserved

How they screamed as they met with their fates well deserved…

WAXWORK

Recreating the horror of the moment of death

My models serve their purpose quite well

Embalm their bodies in wax, capture their dying breath

Drain the fluids to stave off the smell

Like dolls that dance to their own funeral dirge

They play out their death scenes interminably

As prized their exhibits in my dark reserve

They unfold their secrets only to me

Life eternal in wax was their death’s decree

Suffering for my art, they surrendered to me

So when their eyes lock with your gaze

Look unflinchingly at death or turn away fast…

Skin blistered and softened as it was coated and sealed away

Another preserved puppet to prance on the strings that I play

The fear ensnared in their captive countenances I’ve trapped

Mummified and memorialised in wax well-woven and wrapped…

WAXWORK

So sit still in your place at the end of the blade

By my design, death’s hand find you just out of reach

Another player in this deathly silent world that I have made

Devoid of sound, fury or motion, sense, movement or speech

Awaiting a terminus that never will come

You’re a marionette bound by my strings

Trussed in this tomb of wax, your time here is not done

For time does not quite end all things…

This is my life’s work, this still, silent place

A monument to the fear frozen in a cold, waxen face

Take care not to stare into their eyes, whatever you do

When you look deep into death, it sees back into you too…

Flesh bubbled and scalded, as this molten bath washed life away

Wax covered my still-screaming prey

Another piece for my prizing, recast in my mold

Features harden and set as the wax grows stiff and cold…

WAXWORK

Pernicious — A ghastly Gordian quandary to elucidate

Pestiferous — A nebulous necrotic novelty to navigate

Labyrinthine — A contumely carnal conundrum to cogitate

Serpentine — An exulcerated entanglement to execrate…

Hands stained and filthy from digging deep for the answer

That lies at the heart of the matter of splatter…

Eschatological — The grave matters with which we struggle

Pathological — The perverse perpetuation of this purulent puzzle

Repugnant — The wretched riddle unravels in a reeking revelation

Repulsive — The final fetid farce yields such a rancid realization

Now your morbid curiosity may finally be answered

Deep in the heart of the matter of splatter…

A morbid matter on which to meditate or mutilate

A deathly detail to deliberate and desiccate

A sombre study in which sagacity is tantamount to insanity

An insalubrious interest in the inhumed and the unsanitary…

An unhealthy pursuit of the purulent and parturient

A feculent fixation upon the fetid filth and excrement

An exhaustive examination of the excreted and the exhumed

A tireless appetite to hill the silt atop the tomb…

Nebulous — The sanguineous solution is seldom seen before the last

Amorphous — Seemingly always six deep feet beyond your grasp

Funereal — Carnal cartography to chart the course of life’s denouement

Corporeal — The wretched revelation that you sought proves harder to swallow

Than you’d thought…

That anatomy is destiny is the unforgiving answer

Culled from the heart of the matter of splatter…

Scalpels cleave and reave though crimson rivulets

Weaving their cold and malignant minuets

Carving out funereal figures in arcane alphabets

Scars that will never heal or forget…

Like puzzle pieces, set askew, you’ve come undone

The bleeding is ceaseless, you’re turning blue, the end had begun

Set down in writing, flesh, blood and bone, let death be done

The pen is as mighty as the sword, sticks or stones, your end would be cast

In stone, by either one…

Tenderly thanatographical threads are tread and traced

Boiling blood will serve to warm this cold clinical embrace

A clean precise cut to mark this morbid meeting place

This knife — point where you and death came face to face…

The slab starts to spin around and around, as I take your hand in mine

We move step by step within, without so much as a sound, death’s dark design

In time

A slice to the left, then cut back to the right, movements scripted in this

Dance of the dead

Motions so deft, recalled by touch not by sight, footprints encrypted by

Blood running red…

A pirouette on razor’s edge leaves you breathless

The slab plays host to an incisive macabre ballet

A savage, slicing slaughter of the senses

Now splayed…

UNDER THE KNIFE — your death hangs in the balance, on the edge of the blade

REMEMBER EVERY SLICE — of this jigsawed demise, and every part that I payed

COLD STEEL BURNS LIKE ICE — leaves you dancing on nothing, loosed by

Unsteady hands

UNDER THE KNIFE — The caress of steel, just before the end…

Just before the end…

A bleeding patchwork design, in running scarlet writ

Connected wounds intersecting from slit to bloody slit

Such a tangled web of shreds and scars I’ve knit

The liquid of life, leaks out through the red at your wrists…

May I have this last dance? As I take your last breath

With a final flick of my wrist

UNDER THE KNIFE — your death hangs in the balance, on the edge of the blade

REMEMBER EVERY SLICE — of this jigsawed demise, and every part that I payed

COLD STEEL BURNS LIKE ICE — leaves you dancing on nothing, loosed by

Unsteady hands

UNDER THE KNIFE — The caress of steel, just before the end…

Your dry throat creaks without a saliva to sputter

As your pulpy dehydrated tongue soundlessly threshes

Days without sustenance spent shackled and fettered

Emaciated torso aches for the warm taste of flesh…

I will make a meal of you, your hunger I’ll sate

Saw off your leg at the knee to put on your dinner plate

Try not to wince at the pain that you feel

As I mince up your calf to prepare your next meal…

Cauterise the gargled wound to stave off the haemorrhage

You should savor the thought of your repast

Choke down this bitter meal in spite of your revulsion

Though how long can your source of food last?

Keeping yourself alive as you’re force-fed your own flesh

If you don’t eat up, you’re truly dead meat

Legs turned to stumps, bloody drinks gargled in clumps

In this case you really are what you eat…

AUTOPHAGOUS GLUTTONY

CULINARY PATHOLOGY

DIETARY BUTCHERY

CONSUMING IMPULSE

Ingest your corpse to be…

Quadriplegic you feed as your dinner is served

Waste not; want not, though there’s not much to conserve

Severed and severely served upon a platter of splatter

After a while the source of the sustenance barely even matters…

Now a half-eaten torso gorged to the glut

Piece by piece you are fed the chicest cuts

As the dinner-bell rings your bloody chops are feverishly licked

At the sight of your own roasted fat turned and browned on a spit…

Your own meat in your mouth tastes bitter and internecine

Noxious and moist, you get a taste of your own medicine

Gnashing, pieces of your limbs with delight

Digesting your death with each grotesque bloody bite

What’s eating you? The question seems to moot

Scraping chunks of your feet out of your blood-soaked sopping boot

Bash open bones picked clean to suckle at the marrow

As your culinary milieu of options inexorably narrows…

AUTOPHAGOUS GLUTTONY

CULINARY PATHOLOGY

DIETARY BUTCHERY

CONSUMING IMPULSE

Ingest your corpse to be…

Feeding time comes again, the thorax falls victim to this slaughter

Blood, pus and sebum replace wine, whiskey and water

Sometimes survival will cost you an arm and a leg

Your spittle running, red with bits of reeking bloody dregs…

Masticate your own genitals, choke on your bludgeoned testicles

With a hunger that will not be denied

The sweetest of meats is your soft, fatty teats

That I’ll be stuffing your face with tonight

Puking up your own skin, just to devour it again

Is a treat you’ll save for dessert

Fresh meat for your lunch, fibula cracked, drained and crunched

As your overstuffed gullet gasps and blurts…

Your crudely resected anatomy is a wretched grisly sight

But your stumps once arms just whet your appetite

Nibbling at the sinews of your bloody forearms and wrists

Ravenously devouring your shredded survival in fleshly chunks and meaty

Bits…

Eviscerate yourself to gnaw at your own intestines

Bones from severed fingers facilitate this haphazard self-dissection

Clutch at grume inside your bowels with half-eaten grubby stumps

Pulling out the repugnant meal in grotesque tumescent clumps…

Remaining fingers prying off your succulent gouged out gums

Gnaw at your stringy cheek lining and masticate your insatiable tongue

But the pieces you ingest in carnivorous abandon

Fall out of the gaping that you have torn in your intestines

Gnash the meat from your avulsed face in a frenzied rush

No genitals, no feet, no legs, no appendage left uncrushed

Half-eaten tongue oozes spittle down your face — your hunger undiminished

Only when your partially devoured innards prolapse will this meal at last be

Finished

AUTOPHAGOUS GLUTTONY

CULINARY PATHOLOGY

DIETARY BUTCHERY

CONSUMING IMPULSE

Excrete your corpse to be…

All the world’s indeed a corpse, and we are merely maggots

Dead on arrival is our only course, and if the toe fits, tag it

Sycophants, we’re writhing blind, feeding off each others' regurgitation

Disgorging whatever waste we find, breeding our degradation with each

Exhalation…

Lambs to the slaughter

Feast of fools upon the fodder

No trompe l’oreil to behold

Just a wretched drama to unfold…

Gnarled within this mortal coil

Within which the voracious feebly toil

Enamored of our own disease

We revel in our own grotesqueries…

Dissecting ourselves to find nothing alive

Just a mass of perversely animated pieces

Nothing within worthwhile to revive

We’re mired knee-deep in our own fetid feces

Gorging our gnawing jaws with our own pathological waste

Like grubs wriggling in the rank feast of decay

We grind our own bones into dust each futile step we take

As we inch unseeing through day after day…

Consumer or consumed

We all end up as chyme and grume

Upon the fetid mass we choke

Leaving us in no position to appreciate the sick joke…

Twisted through this mortal coil

Now our unctuous desserts are brought to a boil

Somewhere between the living and the deceased

We gag on the feast of our grotesqueries…

Too consumed by consumption to see our own ends

We’re all dead and only getting deader

Digging our own graves into which we gladly descend

In this cold coil we’re shackled and fettered

As we ingest each others' waste, in a frenzied feeding rush

Leaving everything sick and dead in our wake

Devouring each other in ravening, unheeding crush

As we gorge ourselves on all the tripe and offal we can intake…

Crass menagerie

Eschatological estuary

We create each others' atrocities

In this grotesquery

Asphyxiated by this mortal coil

Reaping rancid fruits long since despoiled

Until our depraved lives at last surcease

We’ll hunger for more grotesqueries…