A life’s work left behind;

remains preserved

(even if in progress),

to be considered as a whole.

Usually already public,

but sometimes not.
Legacy, canon, ouvre,

as brief as single book,

or daunting as many.

Not to be confused

with “papers” or archives.
Corporal punishment,

i.e. damaging the corpus,

physically or critically.

Book burning? Censorship?

Cultural agendas?  Defamation?
Sir Philip Sydney defined

poetry as “that which

we will not willingly let die,”

He incorporates humanity,

despite our fears of evolution/devolution,

and Tennyson’s “anxiety of language.”
Corpse, carcass, or cadaver,

we call the dead ones.

Ashes if cremains.

Or mummy if preserved;

or cryogenics’ frozen sleeper;

or zombie, if still walking.
Aesthetes fight the tyrannies

of hunger, pain and lust. Hedonists

and epicures glorify life’s touch,

seizing their days, while addicts

crave chemical states.
Carnival or Lent? Fast or feast?

Corpulent or lean?

Celibate or celebrate?

Bonfire of the vanities?
Poet Thomas Lux,

suffering from cancer,

wrote a parting litany

like Good Night, Moon’s:

“ … let us praise the joy-bringer

for these seven things: 1) right lung,

2) left lung, 3) heart, 4) left brain,

5) right brain, 6) tongue,

7) the body to put them in.

Thank you, joy-bringer!”
Our body’s worth

about a dollar for elements.

However, half a million

for organs freshly harvested.
Donated to science,

it serves to keep on giving.
For the familiar allegory

of body politic, see Coriolanus:

“all the body’s members”

rebelled “against the belly.”
Heroes show battle scars.

Would-be saints mortify flesh.

Self-lash, wear hair shirts

and sleep in coffins.
Others dream of heaven,

where each soul is dressed

again in youthful best.
Or of re-incarnation

up and down great being’s chain.
“My body to you,” says

both lover and writer,

person and works;

embodied and dis-,

fleshed out and transmogrified.