Why All Biopics Are Three Parts Splatterpunk

B.T. Joy 

When he was a boy he asked his mother 
which monster picture he’d watched; that one 
where even the wolf upturned its head and asked for friends. 
How beautifully the horn toad sang and a camel spider was mangled  
who’d painted all day in the hot sand, better than Cézanne. 
Then later he said he had a thing or two to say 
about the reasons why a fly is shaped so like a church, 
rigorously plumbed into your warm skin like any house of god  
and why too you should try to see their landings in the rich, night stink 
as episcopal visits to small, provincial towns.
It’s mostly impossible to live an independent life. 
Even after she’d boiled away the oil in her hair and plucked 
the red florets of her nipples from her chest, the suitors still called. 
He made his stomach a brass bowl and his sex an antlered totem on the Steppes
but it barely mattered to the way white rice tongue kissed in every rice-jar.  
The shame is all the time we needed to come to know
that we required a ladder to climb into the cone snail’s rotting shell. 
That success, in this game, is only the first of seven gates or eight windows. 
That the only pleasure to be found in a man’s head splitting in a microwave 
is to imagine there isn’t, after all, a burning hexagon that turns inside his brain.