MEMO: RE. TITUS ANDRONICUS, 5.2. 186-191
Our discussions regarding the proper disposal of body parts being now concluded
I would like to confirm the following:
Your Hair
I will implant next to mine
two colours two lengths
to be washed & conditioned once a week
Eyes
I will bite clean through
your left eye just to see
the right I will mount
& encase on a necklace
in plain view of everyone
Collar bones
Lain on a delicate stand
will make fine frames for drums
add skin from your lower back
for life-long music
Liver
Be my cold-water luffa
for every morning shower
& night-time dab
Toe & finger nails
A necklace
Veins
Of your veins a scarf I’ll stitch for winter
that wraps around my neck a full thirty times
Breasts
Ear phones bound tight with ligament
piping down through my brain stem
the archived sound of your sexual ecstasy
Kidneys
Glue them to a pair of
bouncing springy eyes
from the joke shop
kids love that kind of thing
Spine
Pot-planted in rich earth
will bear golden leaves in the dark
places along your thoracic curve
Heart
When I wipe your heart down
having ripped it from deep inside you
it will be the colour of tin foil
& perfectly spherical but beginning
to bloat so I must make
a brief incision for your eternal love
a crescent which I then peel
open as if stroking a day-old kitten
& from which will emerge
a thousand exultant butterflies
that make the sky
shiver & weep uncontrollably
as they disappear from view
somewhere over the endless ocean
or is it the rainbow
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EVERYTHING YOU FEAR WE’LL CALL YOU
Inevitable that I should turn to you
for whom the clitoris is a satellite of hell
mutilators is a good word
but
you can mutilate art or
a good dinner or a doe
if you don’t stab her right
no
maybe we should call you perfumed ladies
soft-skinned and flushing in your trill desires
everything you fear we’ll call you
every clitoris has a soul
and when you die
your virgins in paradise
will not have clitorises
but scissors for when
you sleep exhausted from
dreaming of your mothers
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PRETEND BODY MODIFICATION FOR SELF-AMUSEMENT
I pretend to have holes in my palms that I can pass the opposing thumb clean through like pushing madeleine biscuits into nothing. This fantasy of the frontal lobe opens a new portal to strange finger placements and other ways of greeting people. I am liberated. Why did no-one think of this before?
— The man they nailed to a tree 2000 years ago, my priest says to me, more slowly than he usually speaks over the phone, which is hard for me to hold.
— I’m not the type to see crosses everywhere, I reply, this is pretend body modification for self-amusement, a heavy piercing straight through each palm.
— No sacrifice? he asks.
— No sacrifice, no yearning, no prophecy, no allegory, no ever-lasting symbolism, these holes are exclusive to the present tense.
— No re-birth?
— No, father, because the frontal lobe says the point is to be sinless and sinning, no agency, no regency, no word but words, nothing in stone, just two thumbs pushing through holes in my palms.
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DANIEL ROY CONNELLY is a theatre director and English and theatre professor at John Cabot University and The American University of Rome. His recent poetry has been widely published by, among others, Magma, Acumen, Ariadne’s Thread, The Alarmist and Nutshell. His essay on directing western theatre in China appears in the current edition of The Istanbul Review. In February 2014 his production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler premiered at The English Theatre of Rome, where his one-man show, Caffe Macchiato, will open in September 2014. He has recently been named first-prize winner in the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival.
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Read more by Daniel Roy Connelly:
Poem in The Missing Slate
Poem in Ink, Sweat & Tears
Poem in Inky Needles