An Old Poem of Mine Related to the Previous Wilde Post

Piss Christ in Australia

for Andres Serrano

I’m sorry for what your parents and your church have done

to you, I really am, but you are not my responsibility.

You are not my responsibility,

with your spray paint and hammers, your Exacto blades

and wrecking balls. And though I don’t suppose I want them

to cut off your fingers (at least no further than the first joint, anyway);

or break your legs in several, painful, brace-making places;

or burn the mark of shit-headed ignorance into your skin:

your spasmodic intolerance cannot go unchecked.

Wave your banners from dusk till dawn, I don’t care.

Hoist placards. Pray the rosary. I won’t stop you.

But I will worship in whatever manner I deem appropriate,

whether it’s Piss Christ or Black Supper or pictures of my own

come, swirling and turbulent, magnified, coalescing

into the image Veronica received on the march to Calvary.

A boy can dream.

It might be arranged that you were suspended above,

and golden-dipped, over and over, into a porcelain vat of your own urine,

an exercise which might help you more fully understand

the implications of a word like interpretation, or a phrase

like difference of opinion. As in: I would experience

your dunk tank spectacle as retribution, poetic justice, irony;

a potentially instructive episode (possibly giving too much credit,

I know, but I’m a charitable man and, as I said, dreaming).

You would see the whole thing differently, I’m sure:

a repugnance, an humiliation that would leave you sputtering, angry, damp.

Not to mention smelling like piss.

Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for you.

And could, perhaps, make you think twice (or once, and all on your own)

before you put your fucking hands on any of my photographs again.