Imagine My Body

Imagine My Body

Imagine my body in Polaroid,
a Mapplethorpe snapshot shot in the seventies

looking at you in that half way of disclosure,
naked crotch, bared chest, a half studded belt of leather

covering the corner right of the picture and
I am half in shadow, half smiling

and looking out as though trapped in a moment
of intimacy or humiliation or

uncontained desire. Imagine I am caught just so,
arm a blur but face and body distinct

and all is sensual calm after. Imagine
that the decade keeps me there with some loud

music off to the side and maybe a few graffitied walls
and someone with a camera leaning just

around the corner, saying something I can’t really hear
about disease and art and religion and aesthetics.

Imagine it all in a split second as I half crouch
then bend upward and see my muscles

move under skin, pale and eerie like some
photo of a circus performer, caught in 19^th C. Paris,

Daumier, or some such reincarnation, the limiting lines
of dark and light that hold me

to the center. Imagine I capture an age
of bold derogatory statements and

deathly hauntings and cold sang-froid.
No beautiful flowers here, just instants of a body,

a man’s body, moving like Muybridge frames, steady,
controlled, erotic, tense. Imagine the body and

study it, for the purposes it has of redemption or
memory, for its purposes of recollection and demise—

aperture, texture, self-portrait. Imagine an age
when so many died.

***

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Photo by basskot/Flickr