As I hurtle Down the Road to Being Older than J.C.
I realize Elvis is an Anagram.
And Neither of Us Button Our Pants Anymore.
I don't Give a Tinker's Damn, a Tinker Toy, or a Tin Tinkle, over the
Tin, Tin, Tinnnabulation of the of the Timid, Timorous, Timocracy,
of Death's Timucua Timpani of Time.
The King was Never Bald,
the Tinctorial Tinfish.
This is a repeat of an attempted earlier post.
Inspired by the Work of Jewel.
And Your Mama.
Discuss.
6 comments:
OK, that asnwers my question -- glad you posted this as a post rather than a comment.
When is Modest Mouse? Where?
Your poem is a perfect example of Dactylic Acrylic Shalambobastrification, which I taught to my undergrads while wearing army boots and a sweater, and nothing else. If only I'd had your poem then. Jewel would be proud.
Also, did recognize the Earth Goat pictured on the blog?
No. But whoever that is is certainly a handsome devil.
Handsome like a fox?
The tone of the poem is a delightful mixture of resigned frustration and resolute philistine vulgarity. The first sentence, in which the speaker describes a travelling episode along some sort of thoroughfare or street, deliberately conflates the characters of Jesus Christ with Elvis Presley, a nod not just to po-mo "post-irony" but to American culture in toto, one that is simultaneously obsessed with celebrity and kitch while remaining, in its fantasies anyway, devout and religious. This schizophrenic dichotomy is promptly reflected aurally in the second sentence of the poem, which employs word salad alliteration, as if it were the babbling sound repetition of a drooling, straight-jacketed inmate of some mental health facility. The "devil-may-care" attitude of the persona's inability to retard his advancing age spills over into this riot of "T" sounds, invoking Death explicitly in line 6. The final couplet is like the last cry of a man drowning in his own self-pity. Yes, the King did indeed retain his hair until the french fry and ice cream-choked end -- and yet Death sought Elvis as he did even to that other King -- the King of King, Lord of Lords, who although overcoming Death by rising from the tomb, nevertheless also retained not just hair, but hippyesque long hair, which only feeds the presumably lock-challenged persona's tragic yet playful ennui.
YESSS!!!
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