leap of faith in poetry

it’s always a goddamned tragedy
when a once-transcendent entertainer
retreats into conservative safe spaces
when the world thinks they’re washed up
believing no one’s left to listen except
nostalgia manics in Branson Missouri or
on the outer fringes of the Vegas strip
so they fall back to the chintzy places
where piss-scared folks will cough up
a couple of dollars to be able to say
“look, this person who was famous once”
“they hate like me, it proves I’m right”

Kirk Cameron and his shoddy Jesus films
that guy who played Hercules, oh, twenty
years ago and his even worse Jesus films
that business uses you up and just spits
you out and there you are at rock-bottom
selling autographs outside a megachurch
some evangelist scammed off dying grammas
even Bob Dylan for a little while there
just to make the hippies leave him be

before Ricardo Penniman
was our Little Richard
he sang in drag as the
great Princess LaVonne
queen of the Atlanta scene
before dialing it back instead
to bring rock and roll out to
the white kids in the suburbs

but in old ages when
the limelights faded
there was nowhere else
to go but hat in hands
the old nostalgia circuit
drumming up retirement money
with homophobic screeds for
born-agains black and white alike
who needed their prejudices verified
by a person who had once been famous
it was like that for the last few years
before Little Richard died

and even as an old white straight
it breaks my fucking heart to think
he didn’t get to blaze out in glory
just had to fade away
repeating someone else’s
made-up story of who
he actually was.