6. This Is My Body

You pried the shard of bone from the dirt,

cleaned a bit with the hem of your shirt,

then held it up like a toast and pronounced,

“This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.”

That was the day we built forts in the woods,

and played war, and drank shitty wine,

and I gave you a flower because you made me feel alive.

In my mind, I cannot unwind the edge of the shard pressed 
into my hand from the touch of your hand 
to my breast.

The flower I gave you sits on my desk.

It is dried but preserved,

wilted but red;

I cannot tell if it is living or dead. 












This is one of the ones I am more on the fence about than the others. The words "This is my body are from the last supper. It's like, "Jesus took the bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it, saying, 'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in rememberance of me.'" This is where communion comes from. But it's such a rich set of words-- communion is like the single most powerful ritual in Christianity. It's the only magic-feeling one that survived Luther and the puritans and is carried on in, to my knowledge, every christian church to this day. Now, we start stripping things away: let's forget Christianity is an old, stuffy monster. There are so many symbols and rituals that could carry the concept, "remember the immense sacrifice that has been made for you." It's fascinating that they picked the idea that you have to symbolically consume the body and blood of the sacrificed party. Now, let's pare away the meaning behind the ritual. We're left with this creepy parallel between bread and corpse-flesh. Blood and wine at least makes sense, but in what sense is bread like human flesh? What about the symbolic cannibalism? It's so morbid, and so surreal. And then, if we take away that, we're left with just the words: "This is my body which is for you." Which sounds sexual. Or anyway, I think it sounds sexual. But not pornographic. The ambiguity of "for" is interesting, because it allows the meaning to change depending on whether we assume the speaking party is masculine or feminine. (I'm using the traditional gender paradigm because it most clearly illustrates the ambiguity. You could probably hash out similar concepts strictly in terms of aggression or dominance, but for now, this is cleaner.) If it's a feminine speaker, we get a tone of submission. It's like, "use me as you will." And then, if we tack on "do this in rememerance of me," I don't think we get a single meaning, but we get a couple of striking options. It could be cast, "please don't forget my human self while using my physical body," or "use my physical self so that you may remember my human self." Either way, it makes a complex amount of narrative in a short number of words. If the speaker is masculine, the whole thing is less poetic. "My body" comes off as phallic innuendo, and the tone of "for you" ranges from an Usher-esque sexual ego to a condescending rapist. 

I want to pirate those concepts and complexities.

This is where the words ("this is my body..."), the bone, and the pitiful shot at passing sexuality came from. I think there's merit to those three things plotting out the spectrum I described above in general terms. The rest of the poem kind of fell in around them, and I don't know if I like it or not. There's this other concept web that's like, "I can't tell if my love for this person is alive or dead," and it's alright, I guess. But I can't tell whether that is an effective mini-theme or if it's distracting. As far as narrative goes, I do like chillin' in the woods drinking shitty wine when the second person finds a shard of bone. But there has to be sexuality in that narrative, and right now I think it's both lame and awkward.

I don't know. I want this one to work out.