Dear bodies

He is a good man, a kind man. He is a good man. His interlocutor looks stunned, gazes above his head. The camera's cut. Cannot show him in tears. Later, he thanks himself on twitter. A photograph shows him and a sex trafficker smiling together; he kisses his young daughter on the face. The trafficker crosses boundaries in his small plane, offering girls up to powerful men. Barbed wire does not tear his suit; river water does not take his breath. Walls are for those who come on foot.


A white and ginger goat kneels beside the fence, as if to pray or disrespect the flag. On the road's other side, a horse sticks its black nose through a square in the wire fence, thinking I bring a treat. I scruff the horse's forehead, apologize for coming empty-handed.


There are "coyotes" and there's the rich man who "appreciates beautiful women, especially young ones," to quote our president, who agrees. Some come in containers, others in airplanes. "Rape" has lost its meaning, as have "rights," though Nike comes through with a feminist ad after the World Cup. We have given our ethical spine to corporate greed, and we appreciate what they have done to resist. More than appropriation, they have re-made our value, taught us to resist capital by buying shoes, or by wearing them as we urge a boycott.


Is there a word for this that is not "trauma"? Can we extract "beauty" from his sentence (above) with sterile tweezers and place it on a slide with nutrients to help it grow, apart from pedophilia? The slide is clear; you can see through the net of silk. The spider also traps water and light.


We loathe the powerless. This is judgment before knowing. You can see it in their eyes, the cages within cages, and hear it from their bandaged mouths. When shown the man's photograph in her hospital bed, the woman tore it up and screamed. But he was not the mastermind; he had only sexually abused her. Another red herring, this woman's suffering.


And the whole show begins with the discovery, not of a woman's body, but of two women's bodies, lined up one half to the other half. The muse of our entertainment is death. You may think that death is "bad," the on-line professor opines over his Converse sneakers. Let him persuade you there is no soul, just bodies.


The body that entertains no more commands is dead. The body that entertains them all is robot. The body compassionate was well programmed. A suicide-prevention app shall save our youth, as we preserve our other files. His before and after photographs were more metamorphosis than alteration. We see his anger as self-pity, his pity as poison.


Do not look at the powerful man as an abstraction. He is complicated, like the rest of us. Anger uncomplicates us, demanding retribution. But oh to see him in Inferno, surrounded by girls armed with knives. Their wrists are scarred but they look outward, now, at him, bound to a gold toilet that flounders in the river. Gather his debts as you may; repay them with any sound that stands in for  "hope."