You walk into what looks like a post war apartment block, there’s a
modern metalwork panel that serves as a gate or a screen, very modest,
not far from the tram stop. Past that and into the cloister around a
garden quadrangle, its a bit Monastery or Nunnery, but with a modern
concrete block with balconies looking over.
You go up the stairs to the side door at the back of the church, at the top
of the steps is the door, the doorknob is made of brass and you can’t
operate the handle without pushing your finger into Satan’s arsehole as
you push down on the handle, because he’s astride the handle like its a
broomstick and he’s got his bum in the air waiting for you, so you have
to do it otherwise you can’t get in. That’s the deal. After that you get
inside. You’re going to hurry past the lions, the velvet bell ropes and the
old lady behind the postcard table, just mutter a Hallo, and you’ll ignore
the historical context panels showing the bomb damage and the images
shot from above, the aerial photos of the aerial bombardment leaving a
gaping hole, opened up down to the crypt spot on exactly where you’re
headed. Right through the floor. On the left is the blue-grey faced
woman, lying beautiful, stone faced, then, right. Once you arrive to the
central cross of the nave where the church turns around itself like a train
on a turntable, surrounded by resplendent Arabic arches like the ones
from Cordoba down in that cistern – with alternating red and white
stone stripes, jolly, and onion domes – you turn with the train and
approach the side chapel, disembark at this one with white washed
drapes, and white washed walls, and a fresh cut red carnation centerpiece,
atop a little wooden alter which mainly serves to get in between you and
him, to keep you from getting too close to his feet, pinned through with
that one nail driven through the both, his varicose veins pulsing as the
blood trickles out slowly by now, congealing.
The biggest rib cage you’ve ever seen, truly the focal point of the whole of his being,
the focal point of the whole of this church, off to the side, but in the center
nonetheless. A wedge shaped chevron of a sternum cantilevers out above his soft
boneless expanse of belly, with all his soft organs behind taught skin, puckered with
pustules, stuffed with garlic under the surface of the skin, knife pricks, puss and
blood, willowing-out like tears, but the lungs aren’t behind the ribcage, the ribcage’s
keeping them prisoner. And, his chest heavy, heaving heavily and tearing up his skin
tearing down the zipper between the finger bones deep inside the flat of the hand, by
now pulled up to the second knuckle of his middle finger, and the skin stretching and
bunching up around the nail. Taking his skin off of his hands like a glove as his
weighted breaths, wheezing through his slightly open mouth, whistling past his little
milk teeth, tug him down further against the inertia of the mass, straining under the
weight of his heavy torso filled to the brim with trinkets, knickknacks and whatsits,
and whatsits, each wrapped lovingly in a square of sky blue silk, with notes like inside
notes like inside a fortune cookie, twisted into their gossamer wrappings. Bits of old
Bits of old nail and bone, splinters of cross, wads of sage, all got in through the
wound on his side, or even rammed through his mouth and down his throat, past his
vocal chords, down his larynx to his lungs. They clamor for space besides the breath.
The filled cavity of our chests. Empty with air.
And Christ over here, an empty cavity, a cavity stuffed with stuff.
So, write freely, without the disintegration of my body, while I lay there dropping out, slumping, slack. Going up.
Losing myself to the pillow. Lolling head. I feel sick again mum, I’m rotten in the stomach again.
I thought they were all empty, but they are filled with breath.