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| Illusion of Order 25 x 30 cm acryl on canvas |
ELVIS/
TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI
Avatar of
cool breaking the law
just because
it’s, like, there
(Marlon
Brando’s character
in the
“Wild One” who when asked
by a
village elder what he’s rebelling against
says, “Whatdaya
got?”)
and the rock
n’ roll
heard on a
sidewalk
in Tupelo,
Miss., for twenty
some years
named the
most
American
city in
America (which
on
many levels
seems
totally bizarre
to me. As if Bayonne
were deemed
the “Frenchest” city in France
length of
baguettes, rankness of cheese
at issue
among other things, etc.);
criteria?
Two shopping
malls
in stores
of which assault weapons stand
tall, oiled,
erect, shining in their racks;
a universal
love of football and fried food,
the natives
as supersized as what they
feed on—pizza
burger hot-dog pop corn
chocolate
chip raspberry ice-cream, etc.—
drifting
through the malls chewing
shuffling
along draped in the oversized
football
jerseys of their favorite teams,
mouth
breathers, too, plus the occasional
meth head
and white supremacist,
God fearing
native born Americans
looking for
some air-conditioned fun,
a spectacle
that seems to have
no
historical precedence. T.
Town the birthplace
of
the man
with the magic hips:
people everywhere
erecting altars
to the “King”
in their
trailer homes
reporting
sightings of that royal personage
wiggling
his fat butt in a Vegas parking lot, etc.
What have
we learned?
That lovers
in whom we’ve
foolishly
placed our hopes
turn out at
the end of
a sticky
day in the Mississippi Delta
to be hound
dogs after all?
Maybe.
Tupelo,
Mississippi
where the
heat, like Elvis, is always
making a
comeback. Today
a pleasant seventy-five,
by
Friday we will
be swimming through
the high
nineties.
I feel
vaguely
Malaysian
or Bengali
nodding off
in my
rickshaw
waiting for
the monsoon
and the
only Elvis I’d listen to now ( Elvis
von Tupelo
I mean)
would be
his basement tapes of classical Indian ragas.
(FYI: the
last surviving Elvis lives in Canada
which, on a
number of levels, is totally bizarre to me.)
LOVE the poem, especially during this CRAZY AMERICAN??? time. The painting calms me down!
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