Poem

From my series on child stars

A catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation            

I don’t think child stars should exist
Or catastrophes, nor witnesses of either, nor the stark cinematic whiteness of stars on night sky in the desert,  moon phlegm
that pale dilemma between elemental and culling, a cure for longing    for angels gone                  stale by morning, pale blue morning     stalemate        demeaning mating calls  of sparrows   

Where  experience abandons  dreams to inhabit machines and become a simulation and the soul is dead and craves a new body  as if it was animated by flesh  and not captive  there in error       proof     we are moving backwards      barbaric sophistication   of  inversions  and bloodless digital incisions     a suture for every  syllable  as it bleeds out   and      the kids  die early      of being too  seen      disappeared  into pictures       I loved them    I could not save them    from neon  EMF  or  openAI systems   from  rendition   from the defense  department       just  today      just the sun’s regular leverage lunging out and monstrous  with  affects from the next world   and    no one      to trust  them  to       

The other  stars would not exist without child stars       nor would any   celebrities    they’re screaming against kings  into the corporate monarchy   everybody’s brain  leaking  slogans           sad virus of   the final  humans   who are not themselves but   their likenesses spread out   as  junk DNA across each metropolis      brisk poison   settling into billboards like the determined women who take up knitting underground on commutes   are disappearing into phones and prisons   which also should not exist, which would solve the cities where you can’t see stars anyways for all the dead architects     and their phallic legacy 

I think movies might be a disease     we enjoy catching     we never recover from 
A grieving sickness       rage sickness       displaced magic   a  mass addiction to reenactments of childhood  of the true love we only   seek   in movies   though it can be   found   in the silent trembling of a blade of grass beneath the shins    of two  friends who have always been in love    and hidden it from one another    we’re unashamed in movies 
    The one about this shamelessness begins with a gratuitous  tragedy  and explains why later  or not at all   kills off the hero   leaves the villain    to  raise   their children     it is redundant like all fantasies        it’s yours

But have you seen that footage of Elvis serenading a seven year old girl with one of his goofy love songs 
his thick docile Memphis mouth impeded by dull lust and entitlement      while she dances for him like a native held hostage in the Hollyhock    colony       lukewarm Honolulu?   

Have you?

What is child trafficking, what is romancing a child on stage? 
I’m invited to try out for Jeopardy,   made it 
If you remove child stars from American culture    the underground cities  come up and flood the void they leave  with sepsis        bubble gum scented lipstick    doll limbs    stuffed  lions   the burning loins of leading men 

a  species  of spectators   with nothing  to   watch   their  eyes   as festering swords   for wings   wayward  smoked  out    feline    feeling      we were  supposed  to be children  the whole time, here,  the whole  earth      according  to God

So why did they punish Michael  for  soul   retrieval  that  sickness    that  imposed meekness of our own refusal to look away             


I don’t think museums should exist, either, and I have gorgeous reasoning  
They facilitate  dessections  of dead and ruined  kids    like    rotten stars held together by refrigeration and markets, butchers, fake cabarets 
Both museums and starchildren  ask you to pretend they  are normal and belong to you as leisure     
that their acts of self-surveillance are sweet and benevolent,
 that it’s ok to desire what you cannot  touch   or hold       to pin it   up    and fabricate  a hunger     so somber   so  funerary       it’s going to feel like dying          when they leave     like Gershwin’s    delicate devotional urban         mammies    insisting on their own demolition      strapped to the missile   in my   blue   note      red  note         voice  note           scopophilia    bloated    with     the new danger,     that what you’re  looking at is  artificial         a fictional entity invoked by      your desperation to be entertained    a minstrel eats a whole leg of chicken in one gulp, no chewing                    true false thing

Is it ok then?

If we invent children with the new computers and make them famous, like ideas or songs that can live outside of bodies         the dense logic of  pop philosophers made into girl groups        and donated to the museum     in the images of children  turned  starward ?       No.   

This museum fantasy   was about controlled demotion    the krill   the siphon in the eye of the muse infesting her  with your desire    

   The end of happy endings for sad children  who  die young  on stage

The end of watching them and hijacking that sorrow for undeserved resurrection 

Not to mention 
What not to mention   ends there       we tell-all   we   divulge   we  are no longer coy   or common 

Would you come back as one in your next life       a Michael  a child on television  even a minor spectacle or near casualty of war with a small scar somewhere or tattoo so it’s harder to steal you   and that vengeance that reads as ambition? 
An incomplete mythological world whose consummation lies outside of itself  &       starbirth   
Watch  them       shatter                and mend   just for us                  just on earth 

Blood gushing from a heart you love with no screen to obstruct your view, have you ever seen that?  

Following up from my writing on Bieber, I’ve been thinking about the child star industry for years and likely will always be thinking about it, so here’s something different, an excerpt from the soon to be published series of poems I wrote on the topic called The Museum of Child Stars, after Michael Jackson who was working to create that museum before he died, like some kind of penance or shrine to himselves, avenging the mass or mis-production of his likeness. This work kind of entered the Ginsberg style of long elegies for a dead-immortal culture. I just learned that he wrote a book called Television was a baby crawling toward that death chamber, so the likeness makes some sense, despite it being complicated by his own posthumous reputation. Reputation is one of pillars of these industries, the worse it gets, the better for the tabloids and killers. In the final line here I’m thinking about how many kids’ injured bodies we scroll by daily if we’ve been anywhere on the internet in the past two years, no wonder we can’t recognize the barbarism of our own ritualized theater of eternal youth, pop music thirty-something cheer leaders, Balenciaga ads gone wrong and into the territory of child pornography, and the fake repentance of enablers of terrible images, etc. Gary Coleman, pictured below in all of his glory winning an NAACP award for his role on the hit television show “Different Strokes,” kind of the original Fresh Prince with a white Uncle Phil, was a security guard at Fox Hills Mall by the time I was in high school; it was very sad to see him in that uniform patrolling as kids pointed and giggled ferociously at his perceived fall from grace, his failure to exceed himself or outrun his reputation. The poem is from after their grinning tragedy museum is demolished, a dispatch from the ruins.