(New Museum, New York, December 1995)

I step into Bob Flanagan's room,
where his parents from Phoenix are sitting by the bed,
and I really should just be satisfied with saying hello
and how much I am impressed by his exhibit—I mean
no body else from the gallery has even dared
to disturb him in his room in the past hour. Yet I
cannot help but persist in my awkward gush
and we shake hands and I look deep into his gentle eyes,
wonder for a moment if his oxygen is really on,
tell him I am a poet too and from Israel and all that
and I am sorry to have interfered with his family chat.
But God, outside this room is the museum of his entire life
of pain—the poem encircling the walls of the gallery, bringing
you into this room through the words as if you must be led by
the nose
in order to enter a place like this.
By the time I understood
what was going on I was already
inside, the little school charts
explaining the changes of the body,
the x-rays showing the disease
and the nipple ring, the toybin
with the superman doll and the leather
whip, the blocks with just
c/f and s/m letters. C/f for
cystic fibrosis, the stomach aches
alleviated by the pleasure
of masturbation, the pain
of a debilitating disease
cured by pain controlled, directed,
made into art.
Then the coffin with the video of his face.
Suddenly his image opens its eyes as if it knows
we are talking about it. Then the TV screens of his body,
the face at the top, the bound hands and feet on either side,
in the center the genitals the object of continual torture.
He does it much better than I can describe—
so banal my little summary of his world torment
—the text so small a part of it all, just the tip
of a pin-filled, flame-teased ejaculating penis.