© Sauce*Box, Winter 1996/97.
All rights revert to author.
The Body Mythical
by Ernest Slyman
Having heard about it, knowing of the body,
Having once perhaps been flesh, that memory faint,
Scarcely little more than a falsehood,
And mostly mythical now, the angels came upon
The impulses and could not make of them much.
And what was the body, anyway, what was flesh,
The infinitely canonical reasoning struck them as radical,
Blasphemous antics, distorted by amorous ecstasy
What wild mystical oedipal culture came of it?
The reproductive splendor, the immoral crash
Of flesh and bones and nocturnal trance ,
The pure upheaval resulting in pleasures.
The word Lust came up. But what was it?
A place of exotic change extravagant senseless
Sanguine sexuality and violence,
The dominion of body the ostensible mythical
Contemporary oedipal symbolic order universal absolute,
And what every angel feared most----
The dark mystery which once surrounded
Everything, seemed infest the mind
With that one dangerous thing---Doubt,
The Divine City of Doubt, being forbidden
To them, and all that was taboo
Being perhaps the body male and female,
Doubt and unremitting hostility to transgression,
Touching, touching what? They had no bodies,
And what was flesh? The rude remains,
The meager fulfillment in the delusory plenitude
Of great and unlikely precision,
The incest the exchange of women's bodies
And greatly exaggerated physical spirit.
The fleshy sins of the body
And a thousand incommensurable pleasures.
What was the act of love? The angels quarreled
Over the idea that flesh was of any importance?
What good was flesh? Blood and Guts?
All false gods, metaphysics, the touching
Of two people---what was exchanged?
The ultimate sadism complicit,
The multifarious derelict falsehood of such joys,
And Freudian nature profoundly ambivalent,
The self-oppression torture, boredom dream,
Abstract phenomena stung by willful impulses
To nibble flesh, the angels being pure,
Understood the enjoyment of the body
And the impulses all ultimately impossible desires
Came of no consequence, not willing
To accept the blood which flows
Between the mind and the heart,
There being the great paradox of the body
And the soul, and having no desire
To live in The Divine City of Doubt,
They attended to more important things.
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