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Pulling the Flesh Apart
By Jane Tawel
May 26, 2026
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Let us pull it apart — bit by bit.
Lay the body of our transitory knowledge
on The Surgeon’s board.
True, the words became flesh;
but this stuff — this meat —
must be bound on the rack,
pulled out like taffy,
’til our bones bend and crack.
Words should be tortured,
eviscerating the bowels we call facts.
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Our gut tells us something
is Realer than real —
Deeper than definitions,
Truer than the skeletons of
Only what we can see and taste and touch –
Oh! We are meant to touch the very Being —
We are meant to be stretched into smallness
Split into Wholeness,
and cured unto death.
Only oxymorons, symbols, metaphors and myths —
Only songs and pictures —
Only stories of salve — ations,
Only tales of trudging the long road toward home,
Only legends of those who die for Love,
Only these are meant to live forever.
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Oh, we must lay our small selves on the Cross.
We must die to the language of our answers
And float in the ocean of our questions.
How mysterious is the human hand!
How awe-inspiring the body’s eye!
And what beyond what I am called to name,
Can I sense beyond my wonderous senses —
Moves and lives in the being I call “myself”?
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There is Some-thing, Some-One, Some-Life/Self —
Who is beyond all language —
beyond all materials and all body,
beyond the mind’s best truest truths.
There is a Word the mind knows not.
A Name. A Life. A Presence.
The Word that sweetly sings to us
to be let in the cages of our heads and hearts,
and once, when homing there,
flutters like a small bird,
Singing songs of wordless Love and Life,
in flight and free within the Heart —
Though not a “thing”, a word must do —
Beyond, above, deeper, wider, purer, timeless —
Some thing — visceral —
Some thing — that moves and breathes and has its being
Some thing — despite all longing, we can not name —
from a heart that no longer beats
but Swells –
Cresting until it bursts through
the walls of this poor substance
that I call, “myself”.
The Soul — burst asunder into
pieces of The Whole.
No longer words on paper
But The Word made flesh in us,
a Picture worth an Eternity of words.
No longer flesh and blood,
But Bread and Wine.
Given, so all may have Life,
And Life Abundant.
Life granted, beyond syllables.
Life, lived beyond flesh.
Life, here and now
in the Stillness
here beyond death.
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© Jane Tawel, 2026
Jane Tawel 