The Pale King
Tribute to a genius
You were lost
my friend
in your own
mind
and you turned
to art
(writing)
to assuage
your ills,
but it doesn’t
work that way
does it?
For art’s a mere
reflection
of the person
within
and that person,
regardless of the power
of his art
(or his mind)
must forever remain
himself
outside the walls
of its pages.
For you were
a genius,
my friend,
and at said art
you excelled,
and somehow
I can feel you
in my soul:
the social dissonance,
the bandana,
the addiction
to TV –
it’s all so human
and American
and sort of what
I used to be.
Maybe as a child
you never learned
some vital lesson
about how to be
‘you’, constantly
confined by
the disembodied care
of action movies,
the internet,
video games, gains
and things –
so many things –
that no room remained
to nourish your
sensitive, non-
normal soul,
a pale kid
raised in a pale
hard heedless world
of shopping malls
and sitcoms
and dry corporate
entities,
looking for reason
and rightness and love
and writing out your
loneliness in endless
brilliant convoluted
books like the brainchild
of a disturbed mad
scientist savant
who just wanted
to be a regular guy
but couldn’t,
despite it all
and in the end
failed to flourish
and understand himself
properly,
even with all
the God-given talent
and advantages
and smarts –
like a glorious
missed opportunity
or tragedy
of the human
soul and society,
somebody who never
knew the light
he had inside
himself
or got the chance
to let it shine
openly
for failure
to see his mind
was more than
all that money, fame,
intellect can buy
and that life lived
outside the department store,
screen and our overblown
egos the true calling…
and seeing his story
and his suffering
just makes me
so sad.
Inspired by the movie The End of the Tour.
