The Body of Pasolini

A poetic meditation on the anniversary of the poet's murder and a theory of why it was done...

I

This November morning walks me
along the train’s platform like
a dog on a leash, to do my duty

going into commuterland, to “do 
my business” in the matrix while 
skeletal trees (stripped by gray 

winds) pluck a melancholy elegy
along taut tense telephone wires 
where I contemplate your passing.  

What is it about this month, where
a symphony of autumn leaves gives
way to this adagio of bitter winds 

that rock Chicago back and forth
like a storm-tossed schooner?
As October’s scales fall away to

reveal its scorpion sting, is there
a force in it that claims other poets’ 
lives like Apollinaire and Rimbaud?

It’s been almost 50 years since you
were silenced; your strident moral 
hypercritical intellectual fury tore 

through the Italian landscape like 
a tunnel boring machine.  You may
have been stopped from pursuing 

the truth, but you rode that road to 
its bitter end, its logical conclusion.
A cloud of mystery still floats over

Ostia’s sky on that fateful night,
a rain of question marks drench
the scene into puddles of mud

washed away by an unstoppable
flow into the past, leaving its curious
bystanders wondering who and why.

But now I know the real reason.

Although I’ve never seen your final
film (and probably will never bring
myself to see it), it was obviously

the final nail in your coffin. Your 
final celluloid scream at those
who (think they) rule this world.

Although the setting was 1945 at
the close of WWII, where fascist 
libertines kidnap teenagers to bring

them to a castle where life will
be inverted, where hope will
be abandoned, where they will

undergo the most vile, disgusting
humiliating tortures, ultimately
ending with their deaths (sorry,

spoiler alert!) this wasn’t a 
lecture about the past, but a 
portrait of the present, today’s

world, using De Sade, Mussolini
and Dante as the inspirations to
paralyze us with the hopeless truth.

Once you put that on the screen,
they knew that you knew, and you
weren’t going to get away with it.

You revealed too much about our 
so-called rulers and for that, they 
literally ground your body into

Ostia’s beach under the wheels
of your own car, the subtext being
Whoever Tells the Truth Must Die.

They got to you before your film
was released! They even tried to 
steal it away from you during post!

Why would they want to do that, 
if it was just another war movie,
which it wasn’t? How dare you 

use cinema—art form of the 
elite masters of manipulation—
to tell the people the truth?!

You didn’t even get the chance
to see it on screen, to see the art
crowd’s ashen faces leaving the

theaters, soul-gutted by the 
revelation of their methods,
trying to process what they 

witnessed in film critiques or
Marxist ideologies, talking about
treating people like commodities,

sexuality as power, shit as food… 
No, these were all refusals to 
see what they didn’t want to see:

that this world—whose authority
we blindly worship--is run by 
professionally performing psychopaths 

who feed off perversity’s burnt 
offerings while pretending to be
the respectable pillars of society.


II

You celebrated the body’s fruits
in your Trilogy of Life; then you
pulled a fast one and pulverized 

them into a cinematic cocktail of 
ritualistic psychopathy; a cocktail 
no one can drink without gagging.

In time, you grew "disgusted by 
the bodies and genitals of youths."
It’s no surprise after being rejected

so many times in the Roman jungles,
an aging burnt-out man cruising dark
ancient streets looking for lust or love.

If it wasn’t your Molotov articles
which set the establishment on fire, 
you martyred yourself, signing

your own death sentence willfully,
even its title is seared in the letters
of your last name! You knew this…

and decided—in the heart’s secret
depths—you no longer wanted to live 
in a world that refused your love. 

I still recall a dream I had as we
looked over a glittering ocean of
cars in a parking lot as you wept.

I tried to cheer you up by saying:
“Don’t cry ‘Pa, look at the beautiful 
sunlight shining on these cars…” 

For me, it began in the ancient 
black and white world of La Ricotta, 
when Orson Welles playing the 

film director (really, you) read 
an elegiac poem how you came 
from the altarpieces, roaming

the city like a madman, searching
for brothers that no longer exist.  
Finally, someone said what I felt!

After a daily dose of family fights,
backed literally into the corner
of the bedroom of my parent’s

3-storey apartment—decaying 
molar in the mouth of Laurel avenue—
I decided to translate your book,

Poetry in the Form of a Rose, with 
no prospects or collaborators. Night
after night, alone in my bedroom

like a monk reproducing a holy text,
armed only with a notepad and an 
Italian dictionary, I wanted the rest 

of the world to know your anguish,
to reveal all of the impending
forces threatening to extinguish

your desperate vitality for life,
while a halo of naïve twilight
hung burning over my head.

When stuck on a line, I would
even resort to ask my blue-collar
father for help interpreting it,

who scoffed at what a waste of time 
this was when I should have been 
having a good time with the girls.

And when I took his advice (rarely!)
staying out all night without a call,
next morning would be hell to pay.

Through your poetry, I finally felt 
the validation for my isolation
among my fellow Chicagoans.

You taught me to look at my reality, 
who I was, where I was going, and
how to express myself in this way,

turning that alienation into my 
own personal art form, gradually
withdrawing myself from my own 

family, my environment, my city,
of which I was one of its reluctant 
citizens, smoldering slag heap of

working class bungalows, or trendy
streets I roamed draping my solitude 
over my shoulders like a velvet cloak.  

III

You bought an ideological ticket 
to Marx city thinking it was going 
to save humanity, but you were

kicked off that train in a flash,
abandoned at humiliation station,
because you couldn’t conform

to their ideologies, because you
failed to understand that it, too,
was all political theater, designed

to destroy life, liberty and the
pursuit of individual happiness.
Just another excuse to control

the minds of the masses and 
turn them into red book waving, 
hive-minded sexless slaves who

are just products of the state,
interchangeable cogs without
identity or individual rights.

At bottom, you were really an
atheistic Catholic at heart, who
wanted to keep tradition alive.

This is the world we live in now; 
where TV idolaters willfully carry
out the orders of their masters,

behind cathode curtains, to poison
themselves on a daily basis, to mask
themselves in a psychovid drama that

will never end. While its indolent 
slaves feast on the bread and circuses 
of new Rome’s halftime shows brought 

to you by the latest pop stars who
perform black mass rituals in satanic 
tableau to make its fervid fans faint.

Your murder will never be solved
because it was orchestrated by 
those who will never be known:

the ancient ruling masters who pull 
the World’s strings through their
secret societies, backdoor deals,

and bureaucratic corruption, who
pull the wool over our eyes with
their six-tentacle media octopus,

who mask themselves and stand in
magic circles like Eyes Wide Shut,
and feast on human suffering.

Now my train rolls into the
station through the morning’s
gray haze with a horn blast that

numbs its passengers whose
bones are as cold and bare as
those trees across the way,

as we climb into its cattle cars
to drag us through another day 
of talking like slaves with those

who no longer want to be free.

Knowing what I know now, what can 
I hope to achieve with an art that’s
lost its power to change the world?