The American poet Sylvia Plath composed her well-known poem Lady Lazarus in the autumn of 1962, a few months before her suicide on 11 February 1963. Lady Lazarus and other poems of that period were collected and published in Ariel, one of her most famous posthumous poetry collections. My work’s title I have done it again is the very first line of Lady Lazarus. In this work I am inspired by the imagery of this poem: the antagonistic attitude, the depressed inner-self, the obsession with death, and the rebirth from ashes. I attempted to rebuild and reinterpret this imagery through incorporating the vocal technique of extreme metal music, without quoting the original poems.
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the army
comes back and forth
searching for the smell
the smell of the dust
comes with the fiery ashes
Unveil the mask
Alas thy faces
Do you tremble?
Blood sheds
on the land of white flower
and I a man of nothing
same as Sylvia
to measure the hight of grief
All numbers
are the same
with the slander of thy name
Wrap me up from my head to my feet
All I want is piles of meat
Grinding
is a sin, like nothing else.
They do it exceptionally well.
They do it so we feel like hell.
They do it so we feel real.
They guess we could tell we are meant to be
The juice of the man
So did Sylvia said,
“do it in a cell”
the greatest drama of all time
The blood dries
so as the light dies
Where’s my knife
with a hint of pride?
Herr General
Herr Chairman
I am your guts
I am your aorta
The pure mercurial rain
It smells like a bone
I break and wick
Do not think I overestimate your small mistake
Burn, burn—
I pour and lit.
Screaming, moaning, there is something there———
Under the flesh
I speak the magic word
and I vanish like a turd