WARREN BEATH

Mel Gibson hung up the phone and laughed to himself. He was a ritch man and not to be trifled with. Certainly not by a female so recently swollen with his own daughter given birth to umbilically. “I’ll knock out the rest of yer teeth,” he thought to himself. Manhood thrived under adversity. I need a real woman, he thought. “I need a jacuzzi.” He needed a steam room to release the poisons. This was no anti-semitic rant, he promised himself. This stroke-like excitement infused him with inflating gasses that promised to fill his internal shower stalls to the nozzles. It was grim business being a rich and powerful man, and an actor of his proportions. The Passion of the Christ had moved Christendom to tears, even those who had read the book. And now he had received his own message for the world and transmitted it via the medium of tabloid headlines and court reporters. He knew it would be received with derision and even with bewilderment at the incomprehensibility of the whole thing. But it did make a bizarre kind of sense to him, purged now of poisons he could regard himself more calmly. The Passion of the Christ had moved Christendom to tears, and there is no denying that it had a powerful message to those who had no time to read the book upon which the original idea had been based; ie., a super hero-like figure who descends into space and time with a message that revolutionizes the sphere of human morality and even of dietary supplementation. It is not what goes into a man’s mouth that defiles him, but what comes out of it The Fisherman had said. And now he– Mel Gibson– had advanced civilization another hair’s-breadth with a rant deftly calculated to be emblazoned across the world via the supermodel mother of his own child. And how well the cow had been chosen. It was no accident. This was better than drunk driving, or even directing an epic motion picture with the imprimatur of the Vatican. But it was after all only another day in the life of a very rich superstar.

It was the most disgusting
of autopsies
We had ever worked on.
This remain
was spread on the chrome with its holes and gutters
the fluid was out.
The incisions were deft and clear.
The brain pulsed in our antiseptic gloves
it had never thought so clearly
smoothly
We worked in bisection
vertically to the spinal column
splayed the organs.
The worm was revealed
if worm it was
Parasitical anyways.
It was as tall as a man stretched out
or a child dismembered and separated in spaces
in pieces.
We knew what we were doing.
The worm spun in fluid and was still. We could hardly uncover its words
when it spoke. The mouth was
We could barely hear its words
the words were hard to hear
we could hardly decipher what it said
We took a tape measure
and its length was determined in centimeters.
This worm had lived and fed
and organized itself
wound around the brain stem
and its open mouth was closed on the globe
of the cerebellum.
The medulla was clean
the body healthy and well-nourished
As was the worm
parasitical.
The body is only host
it feeds and encases
a worm
in this case a large worm
long and well-formed.
It was the knot in the stomach and
the pain
You can’t see this worm
it hides in details.
It sees out the eyes and it controls the brain
through a series of contractions and
pressures exerted
on the emotions.
It will kill you.
It entered through the urethra
and thrived on fear
it wintered in the bones
poisoned the heart.
We cannot kill the worm.
It capitalizes
the worst of
the feelings of the
the blindness of the
deafness is a mercy.
It was there since birth maybe
It was the most disgusting of autopsies.