Tampa Bay

Entombed

Possessed

Deicide

At the Gates

Atheist

Morbid Angel

Cannibal Corpse

Origin

Nile

Boltthrower

Immolation

Suffocation

Carcass

and Death.

I remember 

Heartwork

and

Symbolic.

I remember

everyone saying

SLAYER
SLAYER

SLAYER

and you laughed:

that’s thrash,

this is death.

I think we would have laughed

maybe

in our later years

about the absurdity of it all,

how serious

someone could take cookie monster and blast beats.

We laughed about black metal,

about 

Emperor

and Immortal

and Venom

and Celtic Frost.

We commiserated about it all.

The evil and the shrieking and the howling

always resonated in my guts,

and I think in yours, too,

but,

of course,

the black metal we knew,

it wasn’t hard to find their trve intent,

which was always exclusion.

Maybe death metal was the same, 

I don’t know,

but I think it gave us a home

even if we never knew it.