From our Flesh Shall we See God—From our Wounds Shall He be Named – Leonard Klossner

July 17, 2020

SAINT PASOLINI

 

O, Pasolini,
None but your death have I mourned⁠—
Sereno poeta,
fratello ferito—
You whose poetry bled
Into all aspects of your life
And which bleeds even now
From the corpses we shall someday be
To meet you there in death,
Carnations in our mouths
And grown from cracks in our flesh
Growing only for you, so you may pluck them
And leave us wounded and torn
So our beauty will always and only be yours.

Pier Paolo—
Was it not your beauty
Like the saint’s—so tragic and profound—
Which was the joining
Of the Devil’s hands to God’s?
The sacred & profane, alive in
your Friulian tongue
Wagging in the mouths
Of the boys who read you.
You whose language flows
Like sweat and semen
From the body we devour
In communion—kneeling at your feet—
That your hand has transubstantiated
Into wafers and wine
Of heady words for starving mouths
Which speak only your glory,
O, Pasolini.

You, a prophet
Collapsed before Golgotha
Some miles from Saló
Your hanging
From limbs bloodied by nails as thick
And thrust as deep as pricks
of lovers you have left behind,
Crucified and left starving,
For one hundred and twenty days
To close the circle of death
Left open still to this day
Because no artist past or yet to come
Could have lived as you, nor
Could they have died as you
And so the circle cycles still,
Unclosed and always open
Ready for you to rise
Ready for your second coming—
And suffer the death your beauty deserves.

Pasolini, your body
Baptized by murder;
Sacrificial font of blood
The oil stain signed on your head
By those ragazzi di vita
Whose youth you gave your life for.
And in this way were you not blessed
To be granted death which you have always desired
Death who was your muse
Death as luscious as the flesh of any male
Come at last, and this little death
The period at the end of the poem
Which was your life,
Translated into a language
Finally understood;
A poem which echoes still to this day
Within a world which always begrudged you your beauty.

 

 

FLESH OF GOD / BODY OF MAN

 

Christ on cross in dress of mortal flesh
flecked with filth and stinking ooze
fermenting in His bowels the same
as in our own cruciflesh
we: these walking executions
made, as we are,
in His image—
stained and seep the same
as He; our Son of Man
the Lamb of God
and He is dirty, so come
let us kneel before Him
in all humility
and wash the feet of this body
stained the same as ours
for the shame of our shit—
our sewer-smelling bodies—
is a shame we share with God

the particles of God
present too in all that is abject
and may we dream of what awaits
when our spirit enters the gates:
the flowing of rivers through Elysian fields
and sewers lining the length
of a septicsmelling paradise.
A dream of the Ganges, and we,
Angels all—
awash in the waste of its wonder
purified in profanation
of the flesh of cherubim

the body as scatological record
of its decay here on earth
and the cross is raised
upon the peaks of Golgotha
to elevate the body of Christ
nearer toward Heaven, and
nearer toward ecstasy
the apotheosis of His Roman torture:
the elevation of the sphincter—
loosened and now lax—
in the moments beyond the body’s death
open like the anointed mouth
to sound a sermon of shit—
the last of a life so glorious
that only torture could rival
the marvel of His grace—
to sing its smell to those
turning rapt audience
to the sealing of Son to man
through the expenditure, and
through the sacrifice
of human waste, delivering
the promise of salvation
to those who shit themselves
the same as the Son of Man we fall in worship before

 

 

THE MULTIPLE WIND

 

Breath as language—this body a poem
Every letter a ligament, and this pen a scalpel
Casting flesh as carved,
Like slates of marbled stone; the date of death
Revised time and time again;
Death is the end, with poetry as our headstone,
These texts that we have authored,
A Here lies ____ for all our lives
That we have lived
As endless deaths
Wandering among tombs of other texts
Through catacombs of bones of those we love
And yet know only through their marks, and only
Through what wounds were carved into their pages