Body

Body

Body

Because I couldn’t examine it from close quarters
Like Burton with his magnifying glass
I worshipped it from afar.
The body is never free of the human condition
And either weeps or sings, or becomes restive
If denied bacchanalia or tragedy.
Time is not its enemy as Ovid would have it
But the mind with its dark pledges.
If you kick it as Descartes demonstrated
It reacts violently, for it isn’t the soul which replies
But flesh and bone with their
Entire moral and philosophical apparatuses.
The body is the key to Adam’s children,
Heathen matter that mystics want to defeat.
Serial killers want to destroy it
As it often turns up in court as witness,
Rapists in uniform want to reduce it to pulp
Because it conceals intimate evidence,
Poets want to disembody it to elegize fallen man.
But the body is the sum of its parts,
Sever an organ but the tongue takes over,
Remove a hand and the foot starts painting,
Deny eyes and fingers are already on the keys.