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Born of hot fame’s suede-blue flame
her lips buttocked into Daddy’ venereal,
a sneer so sensual and ripe the boys
came in their Levis before blurting Hey Girl.
None got up under her rhinestone-studded shirt
without becoming quarry to those snake-bit quirts.
On the red carpet drunk and weak-kneed
from all the Ipecac that kept her sashay svelte,
our bulimic heroine would smile with
megawatt-bright teeth that out-flashed
all the cameras, causing a whiteout in the
pixels that always hid with heavy lids
eyes too blue for this world, true only to Daddy.
One husband was a gay pop star,
the next a running back named Knute:
her publicist made sure she scooted
hand-to-man through BB King’s Blues Club
though later in the moonshine dregs of night
she was free to hook up with rockabilly dolls
she parked beneath the I-240 overpass,
feasting on their black velveteen salt lick
in the leopard-print back seat of her coup DeVille
as semis rumbled without mercy overhead,
rattling the mercury-lamp sea-gloom while
she ate the whole sugarshack room by room.
She OD’d one rainy night halfway to Nashville
in a shithole motel favored by truckers
and the working poor, her gal-lover
fled back to her meth-dealing mini-man,
“Viva Las Vegas” on the cyanotic TV,
a ceiling paddle fan going round and round
and round the King’s water-hipped boureee
while Southern Comfort and Vicodin
calyxed their crown of thorns in her brain
til there was no more life to rain on.
Glazed and gone now, her blue eyes stare
beyond the cheap hotel room’s ceiling
to the mansion in the sky where Daddy
smiles to her at Death’s swinging door,
the apogee of all hillbilly longing
for which celebrity is just luck’s poverty,
crashing through the ceiling of fake starlight
in her purple sabertooth DeVille,
up to rock ‘n’ roll’s baddest heaven
whose gilt gates swing wide for her
and Graceland in full glory quavers
with the sob and shiver and thrill
of her savior’s song-ending sigh.
February 2012
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To be submitted for d’Verse Poets’ Open Link Night #33.
dang man…quite the sad tale spun…if this is where stardom gets you, dont knopw why it is so often chased….chaos
Visceral and such an indictment of embracing the glittery down. Fine writing, friend, and forgive me for not being able to type more atm.
No hope of living up to Daddy, on a mission to prove she counts no matter lineage or family tree. I thought she handled the puppeteers well, but in this effed up world we live in, the masses wouldn’t give her a fair shot…she had her claim to fame from birth…and the masses resent easy fame.
Me and Bobbie McGee, Kristofferson, Elvis, Janis, Lisa M, & Michael and you – what a brew! Poor tarnished tots -sex, drugs, rock n’ roll – what price privacy, and what price fame? All captured here. What is the life of the girl in the limelight, the mercury light, the record heat of deep south, hellbound and down; the music going smoothly with the pills & liquor round. On TV denying, in a backseat of a Caddy lying, in a heap of loss, in a sewer dying. What price, fortune and ivory towers? Just lonely days, and lonely nights and no loving ma or daddy. Good one, dude!
Oh and should I have thrown in Whitney and Badboy Bobby Brown?
Oh, such a sad song you’ve woven here, Brendan…she never had a choice, born into fame as she was….so sad… great poem of our times..so well written, as ever! You have complete mastery over your words..
Thanks all — there’s plenty of source material to draw on in this, but it isn’t really about Lisa-Marie Presley (Maghee, yes Gay, ode to Janis) as much as how great talent gets screwed up so badly by celebrity. Thank god poets never have to worry about that … I think Elvis held the hottest flame for a time, with his stellar moves (like Whitney once did, with her stellar voice), but got lost in the forest of taking one’s pleasure in their accomplishment. All I can say really of Lisa-Marie (and this fiction of her can’t hold much more water) its that her inherited lips and heavy-lidded eyes was enough to make big night music in my libido — the anima of my rock n roll fantasy, perhaps, not meant for this life for long, not feeding on the sort of flame that once fed the King. The real Lisa-Marie is a happy married mom living a simple life elsewhere in Europe, I believe, though this poem could have been the natural ending for an earlier chapter of hers. Happily — hopefully, for it ain’t over ’til the sands have run through the glass — she escaped her apogee with what looks to me like humility. Good for her, though our pop culture is cluttered with famous people swinging the other way, from the bright gallows of their apogee. A rite of our passage, and this poem is its self-godded myth. B
Brendan, this reeks inevitability. L-M a sultry way of exploring that..physicality dripping off the page.
celebrity is just luck’s poverty,
Yep, you’re right..we poets might stand a better chance of avoiding the stained ceiling of a trashy motel room as our final frame.