Look at Elvis, He Sold His Soul and They Crowned Him King...

I'm about to head out the door to play a show with Star Called Sun and realized I hadn't done my entry for the day. So I thought I'd find a music poem and stumbled across this in "Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry," ed. Jim Elledge. There's some really terrible stuff in here, but this one by Thom Gunn has some fun imagery and the truly excellent line "The enthroned cannot revolt," which is just as true of Elvis as it is of Castro as it is of Robert Frost and the Sex Pistols. Once you've revolted and reached the top you're done as a rebel.


Also, I had no idea Gunn had emigrated to the US, hence my initial confusion as to whether he counted as "American" per the anthology title. I guess if you count Eliot and Auden in both English and American camps why not Gunn?

Painkillers

Thom Gunn

The King of rock ‘n’ roll
Grown pudgy, almost matronly,
Fatty in gold lame,
mad King encircled
by a court of guards, suffering
delusions about assassination,
obsessed by guns, fearing
rivalry and revolt


popping his skin
with massive hits of painkiller


dying at 42.


What was the pain?
Pain had been the colours
of the bad boy with the sneer.


The story of pain, of separation,
was the divine comedy
he had translated
from black into white.


For white children too
the act of naming the pain
unsheathed
a keen joy at the heart of it.


Here they are still!
the disobedient
who keep a culture alive
by subverting it, turning
for example a subway
into a garden of graffiti.


But the puffy King
lived on, his painkillers
neutralizing, neutralizing,
until he became
ludicrous in performance.


The enthroned cannot revolt.
What was the pain
he needed to kill
if not the ultimate pain


of feeling no pain?