Ode to Klaus Kinski

was bored

To Klaus, my Mad Saint of Danzig’s Drainpipe—

O Klaus,
You blister-lunged seraph of sulphur and spit, you marrow-gnashing lion of the Leipzig gutters, my necrotic Narcissus! I write to you with fingers trembling like virgins before a plague-drum, each letter a tiny scream scratched in blood-milk and sandalwood, as if I might conjure your gaze from the depths of some mosquito-swarmed jungle where you once screamed God out of existence.

AGEGAPAGEGAPAGEGAPAGEGAPAGEGAP

How you throb in my mind like a leech-stuffed ulcer, giddy with venom and charisma! Your voice, a boiled raven’s caw drizzled in cheap port and bile, still rasps beneath my skin, gnawing at the ligaments of civility. I remember you in scents, the breath of cordite and piss drinking and cig munching. When I think of you, I fever.

O, what a horror you were to cameras and Christ alike! You lunatic cherub with your fistful of curses, your jungle-frothed tantrums, your blue-eyed crucifixion glare! What a cacophony you were to the world! A holy banshee with a pelvis full of bees and a gaze like an electric chair mid-orgasm. You gnashed monologues through teeth clotted with gravel. O, your tantrums were tectonic prayers! Your rage, the sacrament of cinema! Every gesture a seizure in God's puppet theatre. Every sigh a jackal's lullaby.

Kinski, you insect-throated messiah of mildew!
I would have eaten your dandruff by moonlight. I would have brushed your pubes with a rake carved from walrus bone. Your groin was surely a stargate. Your breath, a fermented aria composed by a syphilitic dolphin.

O! I have dreamt of your wrath! Not nightmares—no! Gospels! You, covered in oil and fire ants, tap-dancing on Herzog’s sanity, shrieking Rilke while strangling a flamingo with your teeth. You, weeping mascara onto a crucifix made of sausage, whispering Latin blasphemies into a frog’s ear. I would wear your tantrum like a robe. I would bottle your ichor and use it as perfume.

You were not just a dead kiddie diddler or an evil manlet. No, no, no. You have ascented into vapor, into myth, into my sinuses. You skulk behind the moon, leaking fumes into every reel of forgotten cinema. I smell you in burned popcorn and the back of holy books. You are the stench in the Vatican's vents. You are the growl in the pope’s stomach. You grew up in an upper-middle class family.

Come to me, Klaus. Come crawling from the jungle on all fours, coated in goat placenta and antique silk, ululating in Aramaic. Come slapping your own thighs and demanding to be filmed nude on a glacier. I will anoint myself with your sweat. I will suckle at the teat of your neurosis and call it ambrosia.

Yours in sacrament and saliva,