Jesus’ Blood Pants
(A fiction in 12 prose poems)
Philip Brunetti
1. Jesus’ blood pants needed washing. He’d been wearing them around for days in the desert and towns of Galilee. Wherever he went—the same blood pants. The sheep couldn’t get too close without the transfer of blood—red on white, red on gray sometimes. Then Jesus would reach his hand out into the wool and whiten it. Why not? It was his blood pants that’d stained it.
2. Jesus’ blood pants were borrowed from Mary Magdalene—maybe. It wasn’t confirmed. The news sources on this were all anonymous or forgotten, often both. But Magdalene was known to wear blood pants—to have started a trend. With her long black tresses, deep olivine skin, sensual feet in sandals, and the blood pants. She wore them like a red star—a red star’s light…they even had splatters of real blood here and there. In the crotch, just a little bit.
3. Jesus wore blood pants when he drank wine in excess and tramped around with his band of outsiders. He wanted to take care of all of his sins at one time. And why shouldn’t he have sins—he became a man to have them. Or at least to see what it felt like to be tempted by them. In blood pants, Jesus could be tempted by Magdalene. He could even be tempted by Jane Greer years later—like Robert Mitchum had been. But anyhow, the blood pants were what Jesus wore when he’d met Magdalene. Or no, it was Magdalene that’d worn them first. He discovered her in the blood pants—but the instant he discovered them he knew he’d struck gold. Or really, the religious value of blood…of blood pants.
4. The blood pants were part of the psychical dissolution of Jesus. They anticipated the time on the cross, the wooden boards, and the spikes through hands and feet. Wounds and blood drippings—all anticipated and foretold by the blood pants. The death he walked with for a whole life, a sacrificial life/death. Stripped of blood pants on the cross, Jesus had blood pants—in his voice. “My father…my fodder,” he said. He slurred. He finished with…the death of blood pants.
5. The blood pants of Jesus are a symbol. Do not ask me what they’re a symbol of. I don’t make those decisions. Symbols are organic—or they are wooden and false. They arise spontaneously, unfolding out of the unconscious…as did Jesus’ blood pants. Those words, heretical to dull minds, for me represent a provocation. A provocation to discover blood pants—in all their majesty and splendor, in all their decrepitude and unrest.
Jesus’ blood pants were hanging in my closet. That’s what I’d go about telling myself. Of course they were red. A deep, dark red that resembled a fresh brick. A brick in the face that smashes bone and tears flesh…the face dripping blood. The blood dripping and falling onto pants. Another aspect of blood pants: at least some of it is real blood. Not just in coloring—and anyway, the coloring’s more brick. Brick blood. But with a shimmering. A lucent quality—but vaguely. The vague shadowy shimmer of blood pants.
6. Jesus’ blood pants and forty days in the desert…Not bread and not water. Not armies and not kingdoms. Not dust storms and not whirlwinds. But all of those things too—versus blood pants.
“You can’t be redeemed boys, you can’t be redeemed…”
Caesar’s singing in his opulent sleep. Off-key and a little muffled. He’s dreaming of his nothingness. He’s dreaming of a place, a way he’ll never be. But is.
“The trouble with blood pants,” Caesar was saying immediately upon awaking, surprising himself. “The trouble with blood pants,” he continued, “is that blood pants can’t be bought and sold. For the wealthiest, they are unattainable. For the downtrodden, they appear free…”
7. Blood pants were part of the great divorce…the great divorce that everyone was going through. Some knew it more than others. Some knew nothing. Others intuited the whole shebang of the movement—which wasn’t a movement…The whole shebang of blood pants and the perturbation of the free.
We were cuddling on my bed. The blood pants still hung in the closet. I wouldn’t even think about wearing them. It was enough to own them, for now. Though they couldn’t really be owned…
We were cuddling. I won’t say who with—another Magdalene then. I’d gotten her to take off her blood pants. They were crumpled at the foot of the bed. We looked over the edge of the mattress—saw the blood pants. This other Magdalene, well, she was having me. Had had me. I was waiting for her—to put her pants back on. Then we might go out to dinner. I was waiting for her to challenge me with her peculiar challenge: an instructional manual for blood pants.
8. Blood pants can’t ever be war. Even if they are war all the time. But war as a war of words, of poetry—words as poetry. War of the metaphor…the metaphor and what you make of it. With blood in your heart—and who doesn’t have blood in his heart—you’ll make it war. But the war need be words, words that attempt reality. The miracle of reality. The reality…of blood pants.
The other Magdalene that I’d met…and messed around with. She’d taken off her blood pants before I even had a chance. A tour of strange loving—something to seize, for neither of us ever having had a damn thing.
No, she and I, we’d gotten raised as trailer trash. We were all for such trashiness for a time. It’d set us up for scripture, the newfound, new-fangled freight of new scripture. An attempt to alleviate the past’s deadweight—to poetically modernize it. And make it personal.
“If I loved you,” I said. “If there were a thousand holes in my heart and I loved you…”
I tried to get to the point—the heart of the matter. She grinned at my awful attempts. Then she lowered her shoulder and hit me hard, rammed me shoulder to jaw. I guffawed in surprise and spit a tooth out. Blood trickled from my lip. I opened the closet quickly and smeared a little blood onto…my blood pants.
9. Blood pants were being worn because it was the end of the long day—summer solstice. The longest day. And so I’d finally gotten up the nerve and headed out to the beach, the evening redness in the west. But no, this was far from California or Oregon or Washington or anywhere west really. It was a landlocked trailer town. It was my poetry scrawls on tin roofs and aluminum panels. A cigarette burn in the crook of the arm to match the fireflies.
Ah, she left. Magdalene—she left. I had nothing left but to put on blood pants. Then I called her, told her what I’d done. She wanted to know why I’d taken so long—why the delay. And why the solitary accomplishment for something that should’ve happened together?
“Guess that was the point,” I said. I talked about the lonesomeness of the soul. I talked about my real attempts at sham exegeses but then getting stuck, always stuck, on Jesus’ blood pants.
“It’s not you,” she said on the other end of the phone. “Or maybe it is you,” she added.
These were promising words, at least the second half of the statement. But promising in a way that made me feel a little desperate. There’d have to be one more phone call, something else stated, another face to face—or kick in the teeth…a revolutionary approach to blood pants.
10. Jesus sat stock-still in blood pants. He’d broken the bread and blessed the wine. He included all the vile scoundrels in his prayers, words for a way to resolve them.
I was peek-a-booing from a vast distance of time and space. I was in that inherited reality of much farther down the timeline. I wanted to know what my role was, what would be my potential for blood pants?
Magdalene came back, came around again, just in time. But she was wearing her blood pants inside-out now. She said they’d never be worn right again until a second, a third coming even.
“And you’re not him,” she added, having caught a glimpse of me in my second-rate blood pants.
I knew I’d only been pretending. The pretense of a prophecy. But ultimately a sad display…of wanting.
“Wanting isn’t enough,” Magdalene said, “without the execution. The carrying out of the task to completion.”
“It took me a long time,” I said, “to put on blood pants.”
She waved away my words with the back of her hand. But what was it that I’d been wanting? Maybe a taste of JCs’ freedom. All those reversals of the status quo that nobody ever lived up to save a chosen few. A sickly standardization of saints wasn’t going to work though. Something after that too—arrival at the inner kingdom for one and all. The daring glory…of blood pants.
Pff. Too much puff, she’d say “Ridicule me for the kingdom,” is what I’d say to Ms. Magdalene. But anyhow, she was no longer listening.
11. Zeal and fortitude weren’t enough. Except for the zeal and fortitude of blood pants. But I felt so far away, so off course. Still, Magdalene had taught me, told me. Maybe I was 16 at the time. And so a different Magdalene, long before the one with blood pants. Then again, that one had blood pants too, of a kind…anyhow, we did it. Horizontally, vertically, diagonally in the end. We went to a midnight graveyard and chased away morbid raccoons with our 6-D battery flashlights and a found spade. She lay down on the oldest, puniest grave site in the place. The etched name, worn away. She gripped fistfuls of soil as I fish-headed into her fissure. The raccoons kept to the shadowy side of the oblong light that bounced off the grimy slab. The inside-out pants that she’d put on her head, my head then.
“I’m coming,” she said—I said. One of us, then two, the same.
An ancient cure for blood pants.
12. The tragic end of blood pants. The end of the story—the same. We wouldn’t love blood pants, we wouldn’t wear blood pants anymore. Anyway, we’d gotten away from Jesus’ blood pants proper, the way he wore them, what he wore them for. It’s hard to say what the existential purpose of blood pants had become within the smashed iPhone screens of modernity, the spider-webbed shards, and Selfie surpluses…other cans of worms.
Blood pants were for margin walkers in the peripheries—mechanized modern shaman who became failed writers (useless) or fallen artists (pathetic). Blood pants were their last defense. But not that even.
Blood pants after scissors to the crotch. A weenie bleeding there in place of a pubis bone bump, the finer vagina cleft. Scissoring legs in the graveyard fuck, diagonal—with youngest Magdalene. Scissoring limbs in anticipation of nothing—just to get close, to adjoin our bodies in frantic closeness, affection. Youth.
The imagination this dolt has lost…and no cutting free from the sensual. Everyman and nowhere men. Off the cross and in the crosswalk, the red light blinking and the blinking reflection just a heartbeat in the staggering swagger of blood pants.
Philip Brunetti writes innovative fiction and poetry and much of his work has been published in various online or paper literary magazines including The Boiler, The Wax Paper, and Identity Theory. His debut novel Newer Testaments, published in November 2020 by Atmosphere Press, has been described as 'an innovative existential novel told through hallucinatory poetics' and is available for purchase: (philipbrunetti.com).