A new posting of an old poem

This is the darkest poem I ever wrote.

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Upon the ground there lay a mask

In the midst of a pool of crimson blood.

The mask was of a human face made of inch-thick flesh

But possessed of the brittleness of china.

A jagged bolt of lightning piece of mask was broken away,

Cutting across the forehead of that inanimate face.

Gently picking up the damaged, blood-soaked visage with hands all a-tremble,

I recognised the countenance as my own.

Along the path I travelled, passing row upon row of faceless human shells

Suffering the scars of tortures too hideous and unknowable

For the human mind to comprehend in its infinite fragility.

As each body appeared so the brutality inflicted on it became worse,

Each tortured and desecrated soul the inheritor of Mary Kelly’s legacy,

The path strewn with the offal torn from the eviscerated human shells.

Tattered flesh adorned the once-human husks with the jutting ivory of shattered ribs torn from the chests of the dead,

The marrow sucked from its ivory sheath by noxious smelling creatures that feed upon the carrion-fields.

I found a row of newly-erected cruciform posts upon which were the struggling human forms of newly-picked victims

Surrounded by the white-hot flames of Hell’s own furnaces.

I raised my surgeon’s knife and deftly cut away the now familiar visage of my victim, tossing it on the ground

Before disembowelling each lifeless piece of meat with expertly tutored hands.

As darkness closed around me, my volcanic rage boils over

And my bloodlust becomes too much for me to keep inside.

I continue to butcher my victims despite the fact that’s plain to see

That each and every victim’s face is identical to mine.

© Myles Cook, 2007