[Instrumental]
Pulverization- bones snap, break, and rend
Trituration- truncheon falls again and again
Castigation- dumbstruck, dazed and contused
Excruciation- blackened, bludgeoned, blinded, and bruised
As hammer to anvil
As hammer…
As hammer to anvil
To anvil…
Agonized- pummeled, crushed, pounded, and beat
Tenderized- cringing, battered human meat
Traumatized- painful, unbearable, ceaseless throbbing
Brutalized- thrashed and subjected to quite a drubbing
As hammer to anvil
As hammer…
As hammer to anvil
To anvil…
Forging death, upon this human anvil
Prepared to smite as I raise the handle
Writhe in pain, at the hammer’s blow
Hammer fells, like tolling bells
Ring out their dull and pounding knells
The final sounds, you’ll ever know
I smash your brittle bones to powder
Screams crescendo ever louder
Your shattered torso now gone to bits
A puzzle of pieces that no longer fit
As hammer to anvil
As hammer…
As hammer to anvil
To anvil…
Epicurean pathology
Shattered gross anatomy
Bodily fluids, foul and septic
I sing the body decrepit
Your funeral, my feast
You’ll never rest in peace
Tagged, sectioned, then slabbed
Slurp fluids from your body-bag
Repulsive, jaundiced flesh - The stomach-turning sight, that I love best
Necrosis setting in - Discolored, rotting, mottled skin
The weevils writhe and squirm - Your torso now alive with worms
As organs liquefy - I whet my abhorrent appetite
Your funeral, my feast
A masterstroke of rotting meat
My dinner table’s where you rest in piece
Your funeral, my feast
Gruesome garnish, moist carnage
Raw bits of human garbage
The chunks seep, they won’t keep
Gnashing through, as each piece bleeds
Your decay, my entrée
I wouldn’t have it any other way
Maggot millet, stuffs your gullet
To please my most deranged of palettes
Splenetic, ghastly taste - The stinking savor of pathological waste
Trypsin and Pepsin marinate - The loathsome bowels I masticate
To dine upon this foul concoction - Requires a taste for extreme unction
But for those who have the stomach - We sate our hunger on tripe and vomit
Your funeral, my feast
A masterstroke of rotting meat
My dinner table’s where you rest in piece
Your funeral, my feast
Your funeral, my feast
I see the world through cadaver eyes
Sickened by the sight of all that I despise
Rotting mass devoured by maggots and flies
A ghoulish feast upon the necrotized
I see the world through cadaver eyes
A sucking grave from which nothing will rise
Too late we’ve just begun to realize
All that we touch, we cause to rot and die
The ichor in which we’re immured
Clotted, purulent, and impure
Infected well past any hope of cure
This is the world that I see
Decaying for the feasts of parasites
The human wreckage whets their appetites
In the polluted carnage they delight
Our flesh their fetid fantasy
Their fetid fantasy
Through cadaver eyes - the shroud torn back
To view the carnage at which we hack - bleeding black
Through cadaver eyes - see only death
The putrid truth of what is left - rotten flesh
Inhale the crematory’s noxious reek
Savor the stench of a world deceased
The taste of slaughter that our palettes seek
To dull the buzzing in our brains
Taste the blight fester within your flesh
With every mouthful that you gasp for breath
Revolted by this wretched world grotesque
And every horror it contains
Every horror it contains
Through cadaver eyes - the shroud torn back
To view the carnage at which we hack - bleeding black
Through cadaver eyes - see only death
The putrid truth of what is left - rotten flesh
Through cadaver eyes - the shroud torn back
To view the carnage at which we hack - bleeding black
Through cadaver eyes - see only death
The putrid truth of what is left - rotten flesh
All the world is a cadaver’s eye
We crawl like maggots from beneath its stye
Engorged we consume, to be consumed in time
A noisome plague in both death and life
Purulent portents augur decrepit demise
A tumescent terminus draws near
Sloughing skin, boils erupt before your very eyes
Carbuncles and lesions appear
Wracked with infection - excruciated
An affliction which will not abate
Eczemic flesh stripped away - excoriated
A fetid, disease-ridden fate
Moribund, vomiting blood
All over the hospital floor
Not long for this earth, it only gets worse
Physiognomy ridden with sores
Rendered grotesque, thorax fills with cess
Suffering until your demise
Corrode from within, sepsis sets in
Innards begin to liquefy
Too late, face fate- Await, death’s gate
Sound the death knell - Sound the death knell
Overripe omens ooze out of your maw
Excrescent expectorate expunged
Sallowed skin, blistered and raw
Hacking up bits of clot-caked gunge
Riddled with welts - suppurated
Day by day this decay sprays its filth
Drain the pus into pans - intubated
Discharging bloody, pyomorphic swill
Feculent, purulent
Rampant infection now grown out of hand
Nauseated, expectorated
Bits of innards floating in your bedpan
Too late, face fate- Await, death’s gate
Sound the death knell - Sound the death knell
Disgusting yourself, you turn inside out
Epidermal revulsion takes hold
Prognosis is grim, there can no more doubt
You’re soon to be stiff, dead and cold
Vital organs spew forth - regurgitated
Prolapse of bowels, sinew and crud
Sanguineous breath - asphyxiated
Esophagus torn, drown in your own blood
Violent death, terminal breath
The hospital bed now a gore-soaked grave
Your execrable corpse, taken down to the morgue
Fodder for pathologists depraved
Too late, face fate- Await, death’s gate
Sound the death knell - Sound the death knell
Life made to imitate art
Disfigured features re-sected upon being torn apart
My cubist rhinoplasty has left you defaced
Any semblance of dignity erased and replaced
The face of death staring at you is only your own
Distorted and twisted to form
The medium of meat, tendon, sinew and bone
Distorted and twisted to form
Eye-sockets rerouted, now to re-wire your shattered jaw
Aesthetic mutilation leaves facial tissue red raw
Gouged, cleft and hacked, now you’re drastically deformed
Through your grisly countenance, as an objet d’art you are reborn
The face of death staring at you is only your own
Distorted and twisted to form
The medium of meat, tendon, sinew and bone
Distorted and twisted to form
Sightless eyes - gaze vacantly at the monstrous face in the reflection
Chiaroscuro realized - Obscure art incarnated through unnatural selection
Disintegrating death masque
eering features rearranged disgustingly askew
The work of a hack
our visage gleams with the moist sheen of sanguine and sinew
The face of death staring at you is only your own
Distorted and twisted to form
The medium of meat, tendon, sinew and bone
Distorted and twisted to form
This olidous odyssey
A macabre descent
Through a mass of necrosis
To reach beyond the end
Suppurative cessation
An ending in gore
Pathological obsession
To reach the rotten core
Tangle of bowels I now unravel deep within
Lost in this carnal labyrinth
Tumescent hive, or just a human rubbish bin
Lost in this carnal labyrinth, I rot within
Serpentine intestines
Their coil unwinds
Mortuous vexation
Is all there is to find
Repugnant, reeking maze
That seems without egress
Enterotome, chisel and bonesaw the keys
To open the abscess
Tangle of bowels I now unravel deep within
Lost in this carnal labyrinth
Tumescent hive, or just a human rubbish bin
Lost in this carnal labyrinth, I rot within
Quagmire in pus
Livor Mortis’ aftermath
Posthumous waste
Culling human chaff
The grotesque grip
Of death’s dissolve
Ensnared in entrails
The puzzle unsolved
Tangle of bowels I now unravel deep within
Lost in this carnal labyrinth
Tumescent hive, or just a human rubbish bin
Lost in this carnal labyrinth, I rot within
Throw open the drawers in the dissection ward
Hone the keen of the scalpel’s dread blade
Scrub down the slab, for toes yet to be tagged
And Y-shaped thoracic incisions to be made
Slice - through the corpses that now lay before us
Postmortem butchery
Hack - through the thorax with bonesaw and pick-axe
Recreational pathology
In death we are brought to this - Dis-assembly line
Our legacy is hacked to bits - Dis-assembly line
On toe-tags our epigraphs writ, reduced to bone,
flesh, bowels and shit
Dis-assembly line
Ribcages shattered, gastric acids spatter
The trocar suctions sebum and bile
Craniotomies botched, cold blood curdles and clots
Staining forceps, hemostat and file
Rend - through cold flesh, never minding the mess
Dis-organized carnal junk heap
Slash - limb, hands, and feet, autopsy incomplete
Just another piece of dead meat
In death we are brought to this - Dis-assembly line
Our legacy is hacked to bits - Dis-assembly line
On toe-tags our epigraphs writ,
reduced to bone, flesh, bowels and shit
Dis-assembly line
Cankered cadavers, strewn in swollen disorder
An abattoir of the deceased
Slaughter the dead, spraying green, black and red
In gastric discharge I stand ankle-deep
Tear - out the brains of the sadistically splayed
Indignities heaped upon their expiration
Shred - unseeing eyes and gash venal, flabby thighs
With macabre, sardonic vexation
In death we are brought to this - Dis-assembly line
Our legacy is hacked to bits - Dis-assembly line
On toe-tags our epigraphs writ,
reduced to bone, flesh, bowels and shit
Dis-assembly line
A shamble of rancid flesh despoiled and left to rot
Another commodity, slaughtered, skinned, and cheaply bought
The scent entices, the necrovores began to slaver
Scavengers buzz and burrow in their putrescent palaver
If you bleed it, they will come
As sharks grown voracious at the scent of chum
Necrotized - anaesthetized
Necrotized - dehumanized
Bile-baiting is child’s play, second nature of the beast
To serve up a bilious buffet for our feculent, feral feast
A thrill-kill marathon to hyper-stimulate the reptile brain
Tune in, turn on, to a titillating thanatotic refrain
If you bleed it, they will come
To feast upon what’s spewed from humanity’s rectum
Necrotized - desensitized
Necrotized - lobotomized
The mind of morbidity perplexed
Putrefaction’s pungent, prurient hex
With vivisecting vitriol we vex
Our sordid, soiled, slaughterous secrets
Shocking, septic, sickening scenes, all taken to extremes
Sardonic grins, take the place of outraged screams
When waking nightmare is de rigeur for the daily grind
Waxing grotesque is the best means of killing time
If you bleed it, they will come
To live vicariously through the deaths and lives of scum
Necrotized - commoditized
Necrotized - cadaverized
Necrotized
Necrotopian vision of a world deceased
A tumescent carcass upon which the morbid feast
The salubrious veneer pulled back to reveal
A gruesome hulk of rotting meat where fluids congeal
Truth - without beauty
Cruelty - without beauty
Funereality
Global mass-grave for humanity
Where the ghoulish feed on atrocities
Funereality
Immersed within a miasma of carnage
We chew our way through a quagmire of human garbage
This world belongs to the maggots, weevils and grubs
Who gladly join us in the graves that we’ve so eagerly dug
Truth - without beauty
Cruelty - without beauty
Funereality
The mass-grave grows exponentially
The voracious feed as the rapacious bleed
Funereality
Our destiny manifest only in autopsies
A landscape of monuments and cemeteries
Befouled air smelling thick of the crematory
Our deadened world laid to rest permanently
Truth - without beauty
Cruelty - without beauty
Funereality
An abattoir of grotesqueries
A planetary mortuary
This is funereality
Desensitized to the necrotized, a trompe-l’oeil made zombified
Mocking death mask for the mortified -deformed
Repellant rite now sanctified, pallid parody of the putrefied
In formaldehyde death now baptized - reborn
The sickening sight now sanitized
In celebration of the demised
Death unrevealed - decay clumsily disguised
But behind the lurid, leering eyes
Decomposition will arise
So let it be rotten - so let it be done
Behind the shroud decrepitude begun
So let it be rotten - so let it be done
So let it be rotten
So let it be rotten - so let it be done
So let it be rotten
Immured deep within the absurd, beyond the pale obscenely blurred
Rigor mortis sets in undeterred - putrescent
Embalmed in lugubrious repose, as from within you decompose
Unmoved by orchid, lily, or rose - quiescent
The distasteful scent lurks just beneath
The truth of death lay out of reach
Its cold caress - would curdle funeral wreaths
But beyond the mendacious mask you’ll see
Putrefaction’s perfidy
So let it be rotten - so let it be done
Within the casket, decay has claimed its throne
So let it be rotten - so let it be done
Death worms its way into the corpse its work begun
So let it be rotten – let it be done
Place these coins upon your eyes
The final payment in your necrotic tithe
And so the gleam that rendered you blind
Affords the last entertainment you'll ever buy
Filthy lucre's gleam - leaves you excoriated at the seams
The rented corpse you've been, now teems, a necrovore's unburied dream
Coin of the realm misspent - another grey life, came and went
Sundered and rent, your carcass spent upon the wheel unbent
Coins - upon the eyes
You paid to live, now pay to die
A lifetime bled out by degrees
Haemorrhaging figuratively
Now as you pay the final fee
It comes to pass quite literally
Evil's root unquenched - from your cold dead hands your legacy wrenched
Into the trench to stench along the other dead blood-drenched
Mortgaged life past due - just as you knew you'd one day rue
The contract in blood they drew, you signed and what ensued is that they ran you through
Coins - upon the eyes
You paid to live, now pay to die
Now pay to die
DIE!
Die - even as you think you live
Die - with all you have to give
Die - lifesblood drained as through a sieve
Die - with all your regrets to forgive - never forgive
This tenebrous tariff will cost you dear
In sweat and blood, but please no tears
Clinking coppers fall upon dead ears
Overdrawn and overtaxed for years
Coffin nails are never still - ever more plots we've yet to fill
Another deposit in the till, gravehills, rising grim and still
Some say that death is dead - it's all undertaking, too much overhead
But in sooth I'm in the red, in my deathbed I repose obscenely overfed
Coins - upon the eyes
You paid to live, now pay to die
An endless funeral procession marches on
Numbed and grey as they delay their slow decay into the ground
Nameless tombs amid the gloom, await like shadowed, grim cocoons
They are the dead and this dirge is their swansong
Those of the unlife infest the carcass of the world
Bloodless eyes look to the sky as their flag is unfurled
Marionettes dance out their days pulled by razor-wire strings
Inching nearer to their graves with every requiem they sing
Dust to destiny they inherit a dying world undone
An oblong box to mold them, in the shape of deaths to come
Upon battered, shredded heartstrings, their threnody strummed
Lives without meaning form the shape of deaths to come
The shape of deaths to come
Dead words fall on dead ears to fill dead time
As into their gilded coffins, they eagerly climb
To die out their last days, in a wasteful, putrid haze
And so en masse, at last they deteriorate into decline
Those of the unlife ingest the carcass of the world
Slobbering lips are licked as their banner is unfurled
Puppeteers slash a danse macabre with their razor-wire strings
Dragging us deeper into the grave with every requiem - we sing
Dust to destiny they inherit a dying world undone
An oblong box to mold them, in the shape of deaths to come
Upon battered, shredded heartstrings, their threnody strummed
Lives without meaning form the shape of deaths to come
The shape of deaths to come
An endless funeral procession marches on
Numbed and grey as they delay their slow decay into the ground
Nameless tombs amid the gloom, await like shadowed, grim cocoons
They are the dead and this dirge is their swansong
Those of the unlife infest the carcass of the world
Bloodless eyes look to the sky as their flag is unfurled
Marionettes dance out their days pulled by razor-wire strings
Inching nearer to their graves with every requiem they sing
Dust to destiny they inherit a dying world undone
An oblong box to mold them, in the shape of deaths to come
Upon battered, shredded heartstrings, their threnody strummed
Lives without meaning form the shape of deaths to come
The shape of deaths to come
Dead words fall on dead ears to fill dead time
As into their gilded coffins, they eagerly climb
To die out their last days, in a wasteful, putrid haze
And so en masse, at last they deteriorate into decline
Those of the unlife ingest the carcass of the world
Slobbering lips are licked as their banner is unfurled
Puppeteers slash a danse macabre with their razor-wire strings
Dragging us deeper into the grave with every requiem - we sing
Dust to destiny they inherit a dying world undone
An oblong box to mold them, in the shape of deaths to come
Upon battered, shredded heartstrings, their threnody strummed
Lives without meaning form the shape of deaths to come
The shape of deaths to come
A moribund procession, rots its way through the streets
Eagerly slavering for the essence they'll secrete
Smearing the walls of the world, with mephitic putrescence
They drag all within it, to their state of excrescence
Necrocracy
One nation buried under the debt
Necrocracy
One nation rotting under the dead
Necrocracy
A nation nursed on bile, filth, and gall
Necrocracy
With gibbeting and pustules for all
Under blighted skies, a foul banner is raised
As the feast now begins, for all that decays
The reek of the slaughter, mars the smog-stricken skies
And the heady thrill of the kill, bloodstains dead livid eyes
Necrocracy
One nation rabid under the sword
Necrocracy
One nation ravenous and engorged
Necrocracy
A nation nursed on bile, filth, and gall
Necrocracy
With gibbeting and pustules for all
A morbid chorus cries out, "unlife is now birth"
And proclaims its dominion, over all the earth
A mordant chorus descants "only the dead truly live"
A decrepit decree that we must never forgive
Necrocracy
One nation gorged to their grue-glutted fill
Necrocracy
One nation wallows in a cesspool of swill
Necrocracy
A nation nursed on bile, filth, and gall
Necrocracy
With gibbeting and pustules for all
The things you see and believe
The reflection displays quite differently
Dysmorphic impressions held tenaciously
Open your eyes, behold reality
If you can bear the disappointment
When you see what you truly are
If you can choke back the repulsion
At all of your pustules, buboes, and scars
Dysmorphic - vision of self and state
Honor and compassion, avarice and hate
Dysmorphic - reflection forever barred
Can't accept what we truly are - dysmorphic
Sickened, you infect all that has occurred
With twisted truths and honeyed wordsv
The soothing deceptions you've always heard
As you shamble along immured in the absurd
Twisted self-image cultivated
Self-gratifying death mask to hide behind
Dysmorphic animus to turn your eyes from
The rotting truth you would find
Dysmorphic - vision of self and state
Honor and compassion, avarice and hate
Dysmorphic - reflection forever barred
Can't believe how disgusting we truly are
Dysmorphic - vision, from many one
The truth undone before we begun
Dysmorphic - spawned from slaughter and war
Can't accept ourselves as we truly are - dysmorphic
Dysmorphic - eyes that cannot, will not see
Dysmorphic - distasteful truths exhumed from your mind's cemetery
So scrub the blood from your conscience
With a steady stream of comforting lies
Prey-like sheep as you stand ankle-deep
In a river of corpses left behind
Dysmorphic - vision of self and state
Honor and compassion, avarice and hate
Dysmorphic - reflection forever barred
Can't believe how disgusting we truly are
Dysmorphic - vision, from many one
The truth undone before we begun
Dysmorphic - spawned from slaughter and war
Can't accept ourselves as we truly are - dysmorphic
The first ripening pustule - reared its black head today
A mephitic harbinger - of inexorable decay
Carbuncles and buboes - weeping welts to ensue
Blood bears infection - as it courses through
In sickness as in health - sickened by the sight
Of myself in the mirror - cowering from the light
Sickened in heart and mind - bowed beneath this blight
Flesh suppurates - blood drains to white
Once infected death's grip seizes through my veins
Blackening sores erupt, fever boils through my brains
A contagious affliction, sputum expectorates red
Sickened unto the grave
As epidermal revulsion marks me as soon to be dead
Sickened unto the grave
Sickened - unto the grave
My family and neighbors - come shun my face
For fear of infection - I'll be left to my fate
Writhing in dejection - in an abhorrent state
My blood drains to white - sickened unto the grave
The pustules rupture - a foul, fetid spew
Swollen piles leaking - infectious, discolored grue
My shocking reflection - I no longer recognize
As I succumb to decay - before my festered eyes
The only solace I find is that as the contagion spreads
I'll be joined by you all amongst the numberless dead
A contagious affliction, sputum expectorates red
Sickened unto the grave
As epidermal revulsion marks me as soon to be dead
Sickened unto the grave
Sickened - unto the grave
Life looms somewhere forgotten in a feverish haze
As my extremities contort beneath my gore-grizzled gaze
Waking hours turned to nightmare as my senses decay
And my blood drains to white, sickened unto the grave
There's a ripening reek that emanates from my crotch
And I dare not speak the horrid shade of the blotch
That marks my face as one soon to be at death's door
As I now become totally rotten to the gore - totally rotten to the gore
As my bowels liquefy and my skin sloughs away
Sickened unto the grave
I welcome the cold comfort of death's black embrace
Sickened unto the grave
Sickened - unto the grave
Terminal condition,
rampant infection spread too far - leaving many scars
Cadaverous contagion,
to necrotize, slash, and mar - blood now black as tar
Repugnant epidemic,
deadened hearts beat as one - keeping time with death's drum
The rotting now systemic,
the end at last must come - now the grue starts to run
A global funeral, a worldwide wake
Lay it all to rest, for the worms to take
Experiment that failed, we now must help it die
And let our death knell now decry:
Sic transit gloria mortem
So passes the glory of death
Sic transit gloria mortem
So long unrecognized, dying once disguised as life
on the edge of a knife
But lift the putrid veil, beyond the pale and see the light
existence wrought with strife
A shattered hope undone, the dead were taught they'd
none to serve a brutal lesson unlearned
They then enthroned, 'pon their own bones the
masters that they deserved for a gravesite reserved
A global funeral, a worldwide wake
Lay it all to rest, for the worms to take
Experiment that failed, we now must help it die
And let our death knell now decry:
Sic transit gloria mortem
So passes the glory of death
Sic transit gloria mortem
So passes the glory - of death...
For the glory of death - so many caskets were nailed
For the glory of death - so many bloody banners were hailed
For the glory of death - so many putrefying years
For the glory of death - we present an anthem to fall on dead ears
Sign the death certificate, tag the toe, close the box - and let it rot
Place this vile grotesquery in the vault and turn the lock - and pray it's forgot
Misshapen and horrendous, filthy, diseased, and impure - a necrotopia obscure
Better off reduced to ash thus its extinction assured - but bury it deep, to be sure
A global funeral, a worldwide wake
Lay it all to rest, for the worms to take
Experiment that failed, we now must help it die
And let our death knell now decry:
Sic transit gloria mortem
So passes the glory of death
Sic transit gloria mortem
So passes the glory - of death...
Gorging - the glut of grue consumed, vigorously
Swollen, distended appetites - deformed prosperity
Ingesting - the inhumed inhumane, indiscriminately
The all-consuming, never stopping - virulent voracity
And as you toil, they reap the despoiled
A ravening
Voracious hungering
Consuming, slavering, a ravening, so sickening
Ever feeding - ravening
Swallowing - your self subsumed, insidiously
Your life, your death, your thoughts entombed - so callously
Regurgitating - repugnant retch repeated, endlessly
A malignant mantra metastasized - takes hold internally
And as you build, their graveyards you'll fill
A ravening
Voracious hungering
Consuming, slavering, a ravening, so sickening
Ever feeding - ravening
Slaking - they sup salivating, salaciously
Bottomless hunger never sated - consume gratuitously
Accumulating - avariciously accruing, acrimoniously
Coffers and coffins overflow - in horrific harmony
And as you slave, you save your masters the task of digging your grave
A ravening
Voracious hungering
Consuming, slavering, a ravening, so sickening
Ever feeding - ravening]
All who walk 'mongst the graves through the murk and the gloom
You that crawl to the depths of the filth in the tomb
So obsessed with the fruits of the autopsy room
Heed this carrion call, join with the exhumed
A voice descanting dirges
Upon dead ears these requiems fall
The cacophony of our vilest urges
Indulge them one, indulge them all
Come six feet deep to our level
And heed this carrion call
Join this repugnant revel
Heed the carrion call
Those who shudder at filth but can't turn away
Deaf to love songs that but cloy and betray
When life is a tomb you can do naught but decay
Heed this carrion call to snatch your carcass away
A voice descanting dirges
Upon dead ears these requiems fall
The cacophony of our vilest urges
Indulge them one, indulge them all
Come six feet deep to our level
And heed this carrion call
Join this repugnant revel
Heed the carrion call
The carrion call - ringing out long and clear, foul and loud
The carrion call - an intoxicating reek spreads like a noxious cloud
The carrion call - a blast of fetid, stinking, putrid air
The carrion call - you reek to high heaven, but you no longer care
Join with the dead, hold high your severed head
From our graves to the streets we're inexorably led
Stink through the night as we paint the town red
Awash in the ichor we've all willingly bled
A voice descanting dirges
Upon dead ears these requiems fall
The cacophony of our vilest urges
Indulge them one, indulge them all
Come six feet deep to our level
And heed this carrion call
Join this repugnant revel
Heed the carrion call
Deep within the grave
Where the cadaver lies decayed - there lurks the rotting
Within every fetid corpse
This process festers on its course - to speed the rotting
Its ubiquity cannot be denied - a gruesome trade, sempiternally plied
From the waste in which we wallow
To the flesh we gluttonously swallow - we consume the rotting
In rubbish bins of medical waste
Awaits the horrendous, wretched taste - of the rotting
That first whiff sure to nauseate - and its rancid fruit we regurgitate
The rotting's coming
The end it brings
The rotting is the destiny of all that's breathing
The rotting's strumming
On your heartstrings
The rotting's coming - 'til you're the corpse that we're bereaving
In the slither of the grubs
The maggots writhing in their chum - there feed the rotting
In suppurating stools
That dribble ichor into pools - there reeks the rotting
The grue that binds us together - is everyone devouring one another
The rotting's coming
The end it brings
The rotting is the destiny of all that's breathing
The rotting's strumming
On your heartstrings
The rotting's coming - 'til you're the corpse that we're bereaving
The rotting
he humble and the great
All consumed by the same fate - become the rotting
In its blackening embrace
All is eventually erased - by the rotting
The putrid waste upon which we've built our lives - as we decay, maggots and weevils thrive
The rotting's coming
It was here all along
The rotting is an acrid, stinking, putrid savor
The rotting's strumming
Its discordant song
The rotting's thrumming
A defective dirge to scourge your neighbors
The rotting
[Instrumental]
(A welcome to the ghoulish age of
late-Georgian Scottish grave-robbery and a warning to the bereaved)
“The security inspired by rank and wealth against these irreverent
intrusions on the sanctuary of the dead, is, as we all know,
a mistaken confidence, since neither marble nor
heraldry is a protection against such practices;
for what the audacious atrocity of the resurrection-man cannot,
the venality of the sexton certainly, will accomplish”
Thomas Wakely, The Lancet newspaper 1832
“'...a coffin was registered with the expressed purpose of
frustrating the resurrectionists... designed to be made
in cast or wrought iron, with concealed spring catches on the inner
side of the lid to prevent levering, and joined in
such a way as to thwart any attempt to force the sides
of the coffin apart... Some parishes had communal mortsafes
or 'jankers' – huge coffin-shaped pieces of stone or metal
put on new graves.” - Ruth Richardson Death,
Dissection, and the Destitute 1987
“Resurrection men, your fate deplore,
Retire with fore vexation,
Your mystery's gone, your art's no more,
No more your occupation :
Surgeons no more shall ye ransack
The grave with feelings callous
Tho' on the Old Bailey turn'd your back,
Your only hopes the gallows” - Mr. Diben The Patent Cof in 1818
Stalk through hallowed headstones
For notes and coin, trade flesh and bone
Your eternal rest may, become nocturnal wrest
The newly deceased, still bereaved
Snatched from their peace, taken without leave
Truncated repose, for the decomposed
Adamantine clasp of the mortsafe, the muddy bonds of earth
Patent coffins do not vouchsafe, calm repose beneath the turf
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor six feet of sod a grave
Pray the lord your soul to take, you'll need defenders of the -
Graves' occupants, so dearly prized
But to butcher, not to eulogize
To rest they were laid, now sold under the blade
Who turns the key to the mortsafe, when the sexton stuffs his purse?
Nightwatchmen cannot vouchsafe, calm repose beneath the turf
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor six feet of sod a grave
So pray the lord your soul to take, you'll need defenders of the grave
Defenders of the grave, hallmarks of this ghoulish age
Defenders of the grave, defenders of the -
Stone walls do not a prison make, nor shovels full of sod a grave
So pray the lord your soul to take, you'll need defenders of the grave
Defenders of the grave, hallmarks of this ghoulish age
Defenders of the grave, defenders of the - grave
(In which the boyhoods of Dr. Knox and
William Hare mold their decrepit destinies)
“...From my earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.... I
have dwelt ever apart from the visible world. Well did I come to know the
presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances
in the struggling beams of a waning moon – but of these things I must not
now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside
thickets....” - H.P Lovecraft, The Tomb
Dr. Knox: Mem'ry haunts me clearly
The winter of my thirteenth year
Wind moaned through headstones dreary
A siren song only I could hearv
A fevered brain infected
Where terrors spawned each night
A young man grew dejected
A waking dream, a fright amongst frights
Dr. Knox: Though my symptoms at last abated
And the coughing fits did surcease
An insalubrious nature gestated
Breeding malaise, a subtle disease
Narrator: Then with each passing breath
In life, he dwelt in death
Dr. Knox: This truth I now confess:
Dr. Knox: A morbid mind obsessed
Unhealthy thoughts depressed
By cryptic dreams possessed
To ever dwell among, the lifeless
Lifeless!
Hare: A casket-builder's low-born boy
Child of the grave in name and fact
Grey days and nights in dark employ
Set destiny 'pon its deathly path
Hare: Dismissed as morbid youth
Obsessions quite uncouth
Led to unpleasant truths
Hare / Dr. Knox: A morbid mind obsessed
Unhealthy thoughts depressed
By cryptic dreams possessed
To ever dwell among, the lifeless
As all life ends in death
So with each passing breath
My destiny professed
To ever dwell among, the lifeless
Dr. Knox: Into the family crypt, I stealthily crept
Knowing not what I sought 'mongst the mold and the rot
A sight that was not soon forgot
And as I lay in the grave, finding the solace I'd craved
At peace there with the decayed, though they called me depraved
It was there a dark path was paved
Dr. Knox / Hare: A morbid mind obsessed
Unhealthy thoughts depressed
By cryptic dreams possessed
To ever dwell among, the lifeless
As all life ends in death
So with each passing breath
A destiny professed
To ever dwell among, the lifeless
Lifeless!
(In which most unwholesome paths are set
upon by our protagonists, the future Dr. Knox and young William Hare, to
the chagrin of polite society)
“These heads of the profession convert the science of which they are ever
chattering, into a mean and sordid trade, and those institutions which
were founded in the purest spirit of benevolence and philanthropy,
are transformed into warehouses of human wretchedness”
The Lancet newspaper editorial 1829
“It is disgusting to talk of anatomy as a science, whilst it is cultivated
by a means of practices which would disgrace a race of cannibals”
The Lancet newspaper editorial 1832
“Anatomy is the basis of surgery... it informs the head, guides the hand,
and familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity”
William Hunter's introductory lecture to anatomy students 1780
“The outcasts of society, who, being pointed out as resurrection men,
unable to maintain themselves by any honest employment and are driven
to become thieves and housebreakers...”
Benjamin Brodie Observations 1832
Dr. Knox: My occupation was a'calling, like a tumor, it within me swelled
A path some found appalling, that I would come to know so well
A cadaverous career awaited, the filthy task I'd undertake
With a gruesome thirst for knowledge, that only the dead could slake
My studies dismissed as morbid, incurring the headmaster's scorn
My deathly imagination derided, and into the darkness borne
From clandestine forays into graveyards, to the operating theater's grisly scenes
My bloody studies dug ever deeper into the obscene and the unclean
Narrator: For in death's sleep what dreams may come?
And in death's name, what deeds must be done -
Dr. Knox: As an anatomist, a necrologist
But I'll never be an apologist
My chosen path, to carve up stiffs
A career dismissed as a dead end
A surgeon's trade, a butcher's blade
You mourn a rest to which you won't be laid
To serve my much derided trade
Your legacy will fade to a dead end
Hare: The pounding of my father's coffin-nails beat a dolorous refrain
But by staving in those caskets, a richer living could be gained
My heart beat time with the hammer-falls, I learned to pluck men from the grave
And earned the name of “resurrection-man,” plying that reviled trade
Narrator: For in death's sleep what dreams may come?
And in death's name, what deeds must be done
Hare: As a resurrectionist, a necrologist
But I'll never be an apologist
My chosen path, to dig up stiffs
A career dismissed as a dead end
Dr. Knox: A surgeon's trade, Hare: a wooden spade
Dr. Knox / Hare: You mourn a rest to which you won't be laid
To serve our much benighted trades
Your legacy will fade to a dead end
(In which Dr. Knox makes the acquaintance
of Misters Burke and Hare, Resurrectionists by trade)
“The bulk of the work was done at night, using wooden shovels... and a
“dark lanthorn” - a device commonly used by burglars: designed to shed light
where necessary, but not to attract attention... A hole would be dug at the
head of the grave, down to the coffin, and hooks or a crow-bar inserted
under the lid. The weight of earth on the rest of the lid acted as a
counter-weight, so that when pressure was exerted lid invariably snapped across,
and the body could be hoisted out of the grave with ropes.”
Ruth Richardson Death, Dissection, and the Destitute 1987
“The corporation of corpse-stealers, I am told, support themselves and
Families very comfortably, and that no-one should be surprised at the
Nature of Such a Society, the late Resurrectionists in St. Saviours,
St. Giles's and St. Pancras churchyards, are memorable Instances of
this laudable Profession.”
Anonymous A View of London and Westminster 1728
“Blest be ye man [that] spares these stones, And curste be ye [that] moves
my bones” William Shakespeare's epitaph 1616
Hare: Welcome to our nocturnal vocation
Disembalming we grimly extract the expired
Disinterring by lanthorn illumination
To fulfill anatomists' cadaverous desires –
Dr. Knox: Giving Nightwatchmen fits with the mortsafes you've picked Finding
fresh graves to dig, I must say it's a hell of a gig
Night work be done, the lifeless made graveless. our prize to be won
Exhumed by torchlight, dead weight dead to rights
This night work, an unholy sight, undertaken tonight
Hare: A livelihood in death we scrape
Your casket vacant, corpse taken forthwith
From our fell spades you will not escape
Second coming ignominious, unclean and sick
Dr. Knox: Wooden shovels and picks, from your tomb you'll be nicked
Sink to new depths of sick, compunction cut to the quick
Night work be done, the lifeless made graveless our prize to be won
Exhumed by torchlight, dead weight dead to rights
This night work, an unholy sight, undertaken tonight
Dr. Knox: It's a dirty job, finding fresh graves to rob
Solo - Michael Burke
Dr. Knox: These are dirty deeds, six feet of dirt, dug dirt cheap
Dr. Knox: It's a dirty job, finding fresh graves to rob
Toil as the casket's slaves, death is our living wage
Night work be done, the lifeless made graveless our prize to be won
Exhumed by torchlight, dead weight dead to rights
This night work, an unholy sight, undertaken this -
Night work be done, the lifeless made graveless our prize to
be won Exhumed by torchlight, dead weight dead to rights
This night work, an unholy sight, undertaken tonight
(In which Mister Hare, spurred by greed
and the lack of ethics of the anatomists, proposes a drastic
and loathsome course of action)
“...a wretch who is not worth a farthing while alive, becomes a valuable
article when knock'd on the head and carried to an anatomist
and acting on this principle, have clear'd the streets of some of
those miserable offcasts of society, whom nobody miss'd because nobody
wish'd to see them again” Sir Walter Scott
“If this horrid traffic in human flesh be not, by some means or other,
prevented, the churchyards will not be secure against the shovel of the
midnight plunderer, nor the public against the dagger of the midnight assassin.”
Editorial, The Lancet newspaper 1829
“...when there is a difficulty in obtaining bodies, and their value is so
great, you absolutely throw a temptation in the way of these men to commit
murder for the purpose of selling the bodies of their victims.”
Sir Henry Halford, May 1828
Dr. Knox: Cold stiffs may fetch five sovereigns Warmer bodies a few
schilling more Trade in death to make a living
Ghastly currency of gore
Your cadaveric chores, so
Unspeakable!
Dr. Knox: The freshest of corpses through most heinous courses
Unspeakable!
Dr. Knox: The warmer the corpse The more rich the reward
In this foul trade of flesh, bone and gore
Dr. Knox: Fresher specimens are ever needed The scalpel thirsts for still-warm
death Law and decorum should go unheeded When prices soar for a pound of flesh
So I may slice up what's left
Unspeakable!
Hare: Just think what we'll gain When we harvest the slain
Unspeakable!
Hare: And the throats we would slit Would never be missed
Unspeakable! Burke: And so business is furthered By cold-blooded murder?
Unspeakable!
Dr. Knox: The demand has increased
For the freshly deceased
And so now the living you'll reap
Hare: The cemeteries crawl with sentries
The sexton demands his bribe
Graveyard gates ensure their entries
Remain inhumed inside
Yet another source of bodies
Surrounds us every day
Is not every soul but a corpse to be?
And should we not just speed them on their way?
Burke: Compunction be dashed
Though this course may seem rash
Unspeakable!
Hare: There's so much more profit
When we fill the coffins
Unspeakable!
Hare: The tramps and the urchins
We'll make fodder for surgeons
Unspeakable!
Dr. Knox: They live lives without worth
Death cannot be much worse
Wretched ways to make your purse burst
Unspeakable!
[Instrumental]
(In which Burke and Hare master the irredeemable
art of procuring the freshest specimens of cadaver by the most
nefarious means imaginable)
“'Knowst thou not any, whom corrupting gold
Would tempt unto a close exploit of death?'
'I know a discontented Irishman,
whose humble means match not his haughty mind.
Gold were as good as twenty orators,
and will, no doubt, tempt him to do any thing'”
Richard III, William Shakespeare
“In Edina town, where your friend you may meet
At morning, in health, walking forth in the street
And, at evening, decoy'd and depriv'd of life
His corpse fresh and warm is laid out for the knife”
Edinburgh Broadsheet 1832
Hare: The first corpse was mere happenstance
But the second was no accident
The end soon followed pitiably
Choking out curses 'til his life was spent
Dr. Knox: Each morrow the kill comes easier
Murder grown precise
Axphyxiated bodies bear testament
To your mastery - of this most deadly device
Dr. Knox: A corpse is but a corpse
How they are obtained, is not my concern
So long as they come to my door
Hare: With coppers o'er blind eyes, like the one you've turned
Dr. Knox: Death is the last fact of life, scrawled out by dissecting knives
Hare: As I'm taking your life
You won't survive the harrowing
Hare: So gasp your last breath as you choke, incomprehension, of life's final joke
Dr. Knox: At the end of your rope
Now your hope is narrowing
You won't survive the harrowing
Hare: At first I felt revulsion
Which then gave way to fear
Finally came apathy
And at last I came to see things clearly
Dr. Knox: A reaver that hunts by gaslight
The stranglehold comes grim and cold
But your wallet filled with notes and coins
Weighs more 'pon you, then all of the dead you have sold
Dr. Knox: A corpse is but a corpse
How they are obtained, is not my concern
So long as they come to my door
Hare: With coppers o'er blind eyes, like the one you've turned
Dr. Knox: Death is the last fact of life, scrawled out by dissecting knives
Hare: As I'm taking your life
CYou won't survive the harrowing
Hare: So gasp your last breath as you choke, incomprehension, of life's final joke
Dr. Knox: At the end of your rope
Now your hope is narrowing
Death is overpowering
You won't survive the harrowing
Dr. Knox: Death is the last act of life, post-scripted by dissecting knives
Hare: To which I'm giving your life
You won't survive the harrowing
Hare: Gasp your last breath as you choke, incomprehension, of life's final joke
Dr. Knox: At the end of your rope
Now your hope is narrowing
Death is overpowering
Life's but time you're borrowing
You won't survive the harrowing
(In which a shocking discovery is made
in West Port, Edinburgh, the repellant nature and lurid details of which
stun and shock the city to its very core)
“...a most extraordinary circumstance that took place on Friday night,
the 31s t October 1828, in a House in the West Port, Edinburgh, where
an old Woman of the name of Campbell is supposed to have been Murdered,
and her Body Sold to a Medical Doctor.”
Edinburgh Broadsheet 3rd of November, 1828
“Up the close and doun the stair
But and been with Burke and Hare
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief
Knox the boy that buys the beef”
19th century Edinburgh skipping rhyme
Hare: Follow me to my humble lodging
What's mine is yours, such as it may be
Dr. Knox: Enjoy the hospitality, soon you'll be cold dead anatomy
Hare: Along the narrow, crooked wynd
Then through the close, this house you'll find
Dr. Knox: So many honored guests to fete, always an empty bed to let
A funeral party
Hare: Drink up, the hour is growing late
A funeral party
Dr. Knox: The fete will end when you meet your fate
Hare: Here you may rest from your journeys
And warm your bones with a dram of whiskey
Dr. Knox: Drink to what's left of your health, soon you'll be
another corpse to sell
Hare: Intoxicated, the room starts to spin
And at that moment our night work begins
Dr. Knox: Quietly asphyxiate, you see your end, but far too late
A funeral party
Burke: Drink up, the hour is growing late
A funeral partyv
Dr. Knox: S tuff the carcass in a crate
Narrator: All revels must come to their end
So for the constable the tenants send
False friends meet most unpleasant ends
The corpus delicti now made evident
A funeral party
Burke: Step inside and have a quaff
A funeral party
Hare: Where guests soon shuffle off
A funeral party
Narrator: Protests of innocence rebuffed
A funeral party
Narrator: The life of the party - snuffed
“Burke and Hare... it is said, are the
real authors of the measure. It would have been well if this fear had been
manifested and acted upon before sixteen human beings had fallen victims
to the supineness of the Government and the Legislature.
It required no extraordinary sagacity, to foresee that the worst
consequences must inevitably result from the system of traffic
between resurrectionists and anatomists, which the executive government
has so long suffered to exist.”
The Lancet Newspaper, 1832
“The inducement of this species of murder is the value of a dead body...
[which] arrives from the scarcity of them in proportion to the demand...
The scarcity of dead bodies for the purposes of dissection arises from
a violent prejudice against dissection in the vulgar mind...
This prejudice, against the conversion of inanimate flesh to the
only useful purpose of which it is susceptible is fostered...
in particular by the law, which directs that the bodies of
murderers shall be 'anatomised'... for the express purpose,
one might almost think, of strengthening the vulgar prejudice
against dissection.”
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 1831
(In which pangs of conscience at last
pierce the veil of our heroes' occluded consciences,
long since numbed by their morbid professions)
“But woe to the riches and skill thus obtained,
Woe to the wretch that would injure the dead
And woe go his portion whose fingers are stained
With the red drops of life that he cruelly shed”
Ballad of William Burke circa 1829
“[had] the receiver of these sixteen strangled bodies been punishable as
well as the murderer, the crimes, which have cast a stain on the character
of the nation and of human nature, would not have been committed”
Thomas Wakely The Lancet newspaper 21s t March, 1829
Dr. Knox: What is a man? Is he the sum of his beliefs?
Or is he measured by the depths of his misdeeds?
Is he but flesh and bone? The sum of component parts?
Is he what he has wrought? Or what he has torn apart?
Hare: Our abhorrent enterprise, so deeply despised
But evidence, I'll provide, to spare my own hide
Hare: I'll send Burke to his grave
To be betrayed by incarnadined hands
Dr. Knox: Am I a butcher uncouth?
The telltale truth are these incarnadined hands
Dr. Knox: Am I a slaughterer or a surgeon? A taker or giver of life?
Hare: A thief or a murderer? For which crime am I to be tried?
Dr. Knox: So many I've anatomized, truly I was desensitized I never failed
to edify, Hare: nor to brutalize
Dr. Knox: The stain of the grave
I am betrayed by incarnadined hands
Burke: The meager length of the noose
The punishment due for incarnadined hands
Dr. Knox: Please tell me who I am - Please tell me who I am!
Dr. Knox: What is a man? Is he the end or is he the means?
Burke: For lucre's gleam, undertaking hideous misdeeds
Dr. Knox: I once thought I knew, but now I see it true
When you look into death, it looks back into you
Dr. Knox: The stain of the grave
I am betrayed by incarnadined hands
Burke: The meager length of the noose
The punishment due for incarnadined hands
Dr. Knox / Hare: Please tell me who I am
(In which the final grim realization is reached)
“The mob, which was immense... received with shouts the solitary wretch who
found his way to the gallows out of the five or six who seem not less
guilty than he.”
Sir Walter Scott, 28t h of January 1829
“...The town of Edinburgh was filled with an immense crowd of spectators,
from all places of the surrounding country, to witness the execution
of a Monster, whose crime stands unparalleled in the annals of Scotland.”
Edinburgh Broadsheet 1829
“Every effort [had been] employed to convert my misfortune into positive
and intended personal guilt of the most dreadful character...”
Dr. Robert Knox 1829
“The sickly and the hale
Were murder'd, pack'd up, and sent off
To Knox's human sale
That man of skill, with subjects warm
Was frequently supplied
Nor did he question when or how
The persons brought had died!”
Edinburgh children's verse circa 1829
“That his class received him, in consequence of these horrid disclosures,
with three cheers... that savage yell within those blood-stained walls
is no more, to the voice of the public, than so much squeaking and
grunting in a pig-sty during a storm of thunder.... and instead of
serving to convince anyone... of their lecturer's innocence,
it has had... the very opposite effect – exhibiting a ruffian
recklessness of general opinion and feeling on a most appalling
subject.”
Christopher North Blackwood, 1829
Dr. Knox: A “noxious” butcher, a name they will rue When their
carcasses yield postmortem truths Although Burke and Hare,
have their usefulness proved From their sordid acts, I stand far removed
But now from the grave's final jape
I shan't emerge wholly unscathed From this calumny there's no escape
A lifetime of work that may all go to waste A gentleman born,
now stained by disgrace Once a surgeon,
now a ghoul in his place
Dr. Knox: Death and life forever intertwined
And within their vulgar minds
The penny dreadful they seek they will find, they'll have their death
revenge I plied my trade bound to the grave
Now they've labeled me depraved
My name and my work bear their stain, this is their death revenge
Hare: Burke alone stands judged for both our transgressions
The hangman awaits him, then postmortem dissection
Yet all that peers back from the looking glass
Are the ghosts of my past, screaming to their last
Hare: And now my grave, final jape
Is writ large on Burke's cadaverous face
From the noose he shall have no escape
Why let both of our lives go to waste?
In my confession the blame lay misplaced
Once a man, soon a corpse in his place
Hare: Forfeit his life to extend mine
Thus ends our partnership in crime
Lady justice though said to be blind, still takes her death revenge
Burke: I earned my living from the grave
And committed acts depraved
Life ends unsaved and betrayed, the price paid: Death Revenge
Dr. Knox / Hare: Death and life forever intertwined
And within the morbid mind
There's only darkness left to find, the final death revenge
We lived our lives within the grave
And in turn became depraved
And now naught remains to be saved, the final death revenge
[Instrumental]