Heavy Metals

Holy crap, actual new poetry! Published originally on Joyland Poetry.

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Metallica – Master of Puppets

 

Some cultures used thorns. Others, needles or silver or bone. The suture could be made of silk, strips of an animal’s muscle, tendons, hemp thread. Ants might be coaxed to bite the edges of the wound, and once their mandibles locked, the bodies would be twisted off, leaving a row of jaws and heads holding torn flesh together. Carbolic catgut and chromic catgut. Polyvinyl alcohol. A square knot, a surgeons knot. Blanching of the skin. Simple interrupted stitch.

 

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Iron Maiden – The Number of the Beast

 

Will it come from the sea or from the earth? Blasphemous names carved on seven heads, lion’s mouth and leopard’s body, crowned and wounded. Or, lamb-horned and dragon-voiced, bearer of an ugly mark. Which beast’s boiling scars will we follow?

 

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Slayer – Reign In Blood

 

From gouts to thick ropes, as platelets collide and fibrin knots the clotting. From liquid to lumpy unctuousness, fat globs of tissue, blood becomes organ, becomes body. Slit throat of a pale prince, lips blue, bleeding out.

 

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Pantera – Vulger Display of Power

 

Rubber now, originally shaped from rhinoceros hide. Three to five feet long, a full inch thick at the base, tapering to less than a quarter at the tip. Rolled between heavy plates until it becomes a tapered cylinder. Cattle driving, killing snakes, crowd control, judicial discipline.

 

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Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

 

Most were accused of poisoning wells, eating babies, desecrating the host or Eucharist, and kissing Satan’s anus.

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