Cantus misericordia

Mechanical measures
monotonous movement
Michael’s legacy
corporate improvement
Staging in trance
pretense to dance
From the darkness
emerging
To the heartless
returning
The archangel of pop1
wrestling
with wealth
Redoes his face
to serve mammon
in stealth
Romanian maidens2
once crushed by the weight
forgotten martyrs
to satyrs
behind Hollywood gates.
Screened for the takeoff
Cleared for the ride
On the wings,
between legs
where love comes in spurts3
enduring the longing
for boredom till it hurts.

1. The archangel Michael is also the “military” angel in the battle against Satan or evil in its various forms. Michael Jackson was anointed the “king of pop” (or crucified perhaps) by the US corporate entertainment/ propaganda industry. The packaging of his intense choreography and its worldwide marketing especially in the ubiquitous “music video” has no doubt been a dominant if not the dominant paradigm for mass music cultural production to this date, beatifying the meanwhile canonised, bleached Jackson.
2. One of the less fortunate byproducts of the mass import of Western pop culture after 1989 included the death of numerous Romanian girls who were crushed in the craze of a Michael Jackson concert held in Bucharest in 1992, the so-called “Dangerous Tour”.
3. Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation, 1977.