The Melted
Man
Simon
MacCulloch
The melted man has fused with his surroundings;
The parlour where his body lives runs thick
With nauseous flesh-and-furniture confoundings,
Its surfaces abominably slick
With glistening multi-cellular compoundings.
The first to find him thought he had exploded
- He liked to
play
with chemicals, they knew;
A modern witch, his cauldron overloaded
To make of him a splattered magic stew
With strange Satanic recipes encoded.
That film, The Fly, was next on the agenda
Of speculation; surely it would take
A novel scientific force to render
A person thus, a sacrifice to slake
The thirst of some enormous matter-blender.
But in the end they simply chose to leave it,
This oddly sentient stain upon a room,
A prisoner with no court to reprieve it,
A living death smeared wetly round its tomb
Or monstrous birth with nothing to conceive it.
So now he is a horror show attraction;
That man has made his blood and beating heart,
By some obscure osmotic chain reaction,
The gruesome pinnacle of portrait art:
The ultimate in radical self-redaction.
