A Statement Of Death

I just finished 1,200 words on the death of Jim Carroll.
Obviously, pretty influential on me if I’m going to invest that amount of time and energy to a man I’ve never met.
Immediately afterwards, I noticed the death of Patrick Swayze. And while I won’t pretend that Mr. Swayze had as big of an impact of Carroll, I won’t lie a suggest that I wasn’t a fan of Swayze either.
You see, Patrick Swayze is too easy just to pin as a joke. He made some shitty movies, no doubt, but they were usually entertaining when you lowered yourself enough to glance beyond the bad dialogue and impossibly stupid plot.
He was a dancer-a woefully effeminate art form-and his father was one of those hard-nosed masculine types. So for his entire life, there was this weird dichotomy of an obvious talent versus the type of role he must have thought his father might like. Take a look at his most famous roles, the ones that were his most successful, and they’re always the ones where the girls cite as a must see movie.
You know. Ghost. Dirty Dancing. Blah. Blah. Blah.
But what are the roles he continued to suffer through? Point Break. Roadhouse. Black Dog. You know. The good ones.
As entertaining as they may have been, you can tell that Swayze is going through the motions, perhaps unconsciously hoping that this role…THIS ROLE…will be the one that brings him closer to his father.
As for Jim Carroll, there’s enough documentation of his life that one need not wonder. He was a man of enviable truth-sometimes ugly and heart wrenching-and someone who had the good sense to document it.
Here’s one of my favorite poems from Carroll:

“For Elizabeth”
It is winter ending on earth.
The planets align tomorrow in March and grow more distant from the sun and each other like stray, worn soldiers retreating from an enemy that no longer exists.
It is a mild spring in purgatory.
In green limbo the children whose foreheads are dry, whose hands do not grow, are transformed themselves to seasons of birds circling an obelisk of shivering mercury. None are allowed prey, none are allowed heaven's crooked beak.
They are radiant swallows with thorns for tongues to feed on the shifting mercury from the mythology of God's hand, which I cannot break, even now, under this tearful scrutiny. I've tried.
I've tried.
I am allowing to pass through me a statement of death.
You, the catalyst of such distorted memory.
In that limbo the children move in some strange gravity within and outside Grace.
Their Lord is angry.
They have died with their innocence untested.
None knows what it has been or will be ~ each day it changes without changing ~ do you understand what I am saying?
It is the life you chose on this Earth, the life of junk and lies.
But that wasn't You, I knew You ~ you had perfect lips, eyes like a true child, your breasts unformed, an incandescent mind.
This place where I put you now, it is a cursed season, an awkward line, a flawed circle, a snake on fire devouring what tomorrow it will itself become.