My Avarice is

- for the man who was Pier Paolo Pasolini

for your cadaverous jaw and thin lips, for your meticulous fingers lighting cigarette after cigarette, for your body bone sleek and for speed, one hand on the wheel of a Fiat, for your films and your poems filled with criminals, liars, gluttons, and hypocrites, for the martyrs you made of them and their corpses, for the hell where you sent them, for the hell that you scorned, for the way I covered my eyes and my ears, for the way you forced them open to street after street fenced in by inarticulate buildings, for the whore, her youth spent, her face at one window imagining the city as somehow still hers, for the hell that is hers, for the boys, for the beautiful boys, for the illiterate boys, for the obscenities they screamed and for the way you clutched them and kissed them wide-mouthed, for the graffiti you sprayed in black and in blood on your body, on theirs and on mine in black ink and blood, for the hell that you sounded, and for your God, deaf and used up, for your devouring soul-crushing God, for the God you erased and the one to whom you lit candles, for your God, Pier, he lies alone in a small room on the outskirts of Rome, and he weeps, for those weeping, for those who were weeping still weep, for the woman’s face, which is my face, still at the window.