thirteen

when i was just thirteen,
inside a brick warehouse on the edge of the city,
men led me by the hand into a musty basement,
in a room that was dark and dank,
several times a week to teach me vulgar acts

the men wore coats, gloves, masks and rubber boots,
they pass eyes and patches of skin back and forth,
i can see thread veining on the face of one of their victims

laughing, one of the men says,
‘i'm not sure about that effect’
examining the pores on a swatch of flesh,
the other men all lean forward to take a look,
another man nods and reaches for a head,
as he describes how to rip facial hair off of the cheeks,
he alternately chafes and jabs at the eyebrows

deploying tactics meant for a food processor,
an example-bound to excite a teenager,
they were at their best when revealing
the mysteries of those jobs that would
have immediately drawn my untrained eye

bend the torso in one direction and a leg jumps out,
bend the leg down and the whole cadaver falls over,
the technicians assigned to the corpse have been at
it all afternoon and they look exhausted,
i grasp the dead body and try to flex one of its legs
at the knee,the whole thing wobbles for a moment
before slowly keeling over, i think maybe we need to
get the grinder, i mutter

inflicting pain, bearing the usual implements of
this mad trade: a bucket, a cleaver, a knife,
a few oxygen masks, impaled on a hook,
a grimacing man, wearing a tag: VICK,
his side was diabolically, ripped wide open,
revealing his haemorrhaging organs,
not a martyred man,the image was so powerful
that it demanded some kind of description,
it was so shockingly violent

when i was fifteen,
i devoted myself out of complacency
to a field that has become a vulgar
note on my society, best known for my malevolent,
violent past, i am very sweet and i was offered
a half a million dollars to carry it out