Michael Waterson

Michael Waterson Poems

The Best Poem Of Michael Waterson

Elvis In Hell

Even on days he is condemned to shake
off dusty death and rise again to make
another roadside cameo before a
white-line-wired rigger highballing Peoria,
or a spectral reflection in the Tulsa window-
shopping reverie of a football widow,

even then, in those moments he is risen
under the sun, his soul remains imprisoned
in a velvet painting in El Paso,
a sequined T-shirt in a Boardwalk casino,
a Nashville plaster coin bank statuette.

These haunts new and old render no release
for a U.S. male of the old stamp from the net
of impersonators, harpies of regret
drawling old songs that scald like bacon grease;

offer no freedom, sweet and redeeming,
like in those golden olden hound dog days
on the flat-bed stages of state fair midways,
girls in cotton dresses crying and screaming
as the music just erupted from within
like gospel grace pouring down from heaven.

No more: the ghost gig is mere dumb show
and stygian nights flash neon agony.
For he is not the hot act Down Below.
The King is dead; no headliner, he,
in sold-out rooms on the infernal Strip;
just a has-been warm-up for the big marquee,
the grinning boss of Mephistopheles,
who sets ‘em howling with a quivering lip and a quip:
Take my dignity... Please!

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