Peter Manos
Anatomy Is Destiny
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...