Cross Purposes.
In the next Passion Play
we produce
I want to be the star.
The crucified not the cross.
I’ve done the supporting role
the mast and the spar
rooted and rigid
in the background of your agony
without so much as a line.
It isn’t even a part
it’s a prop.
It takes good acting
to stand in the stuff of the set
like the wall
in a Midsummer Night’s Mummery
but without a single word
that will ever be heard.
No introduction or explanation.
No restless movement
of painted fabric.
Stolid and grim
in the threatening
silent meditation
of an instrumental thing
death and torment dealing
without feeling.
Yet infinitely divine
in structured geometry.
Determined in the doing
of it’s being
to be more
than an environmental accessory.
So when the curtain opens again
you can be the craven tree
and I will be the victorious victim
bashing the back of my bloodied head
into the joints of your cross piece fitting
until bits of flesh and skull bone
seal your fixing
like glue.
I will bleed and sweat
and piss and shit
and weep and spit
roaring and wriggling
groaning and jerking
screaming and cursing
pleading and bleating
and I’ll twist and writhe
through every second I’m alive.
I will work my body fluids
into your heart
through the grained folds
of your growing.
I will scrape the skin
from my heels and calves
and thighs and ass
back neck arms and shoulders
onto the whorls and knots
and rough hewn edges
of your natural and man made design
until chunks of me
have joined with you
in uncleansable
inseparable
perpetual union.
Then in my final glorious scene
in a dying shuddering spasm
I will magnificently forgive you
for being what
you are.
Then when the crows have torn out my dead eyes
and the vultures
and the climbing midnight rats
and wandering bats
and munching maggots
have gobbled my flesh and guts and veins
the wind will pull
at my bleached brittleing bones
until they fall in a heap
at your faultless foot
russet stain steeped
in my dried blood
and then … then … then …
as nature is wont to do
she will turn
on you.
Birds that perch on your arms
will splatter
their white waste
on your greying rottenness.
The foul of fowl
will mix with my stinking
shredded skin and baked blood
which with the last of your sap
will be boiled to a broth
in your innards by the sun heat
cooking a savoury soup
for wood lice and worms
that will drill and slowly kill
the last vestiges of life
in your once green heartness
as you crumble
and fall apart.
My bones will have been carried off
by foxes and dogs
save the tiny chips that remain
at your base
left from the gnawings
of mice and voles.
The slender slivers of grime
rotted wood that made you
will mingle with my bone chips
to be breeze brushed away
together in the anonymous sands
drifting and dancing
in dunes and depressions
until the globe is swallowed by the sun
when the sands will be flung
across the heavens
to be sucked in by some gravity thing
and another star is born
to play it’s part
in the so called beautiful
tragic drama
of passionate doom.
