How many of these nights
Had the artist pedantically rehearsed?
Play-acting in a grim tale,
Which had no real beginning,
only a flippant tease
of melodrama.

Bold lyrics had he once,
A testament of youth and promise.
never maturing,
Never mellowing,
With the greying strings of age.

He truly had it all,
So thought the outer fringes,
gilded and adored,
by that wildly manic
Adolescent blood-awakening.

But yet,
This singer nursed a secret, a somber allocade, only to be divulged, By the the intiated few: The troubled and emtotionally damned.

Beauty was his by rite,
A blone and smiling mannequin of flesh,
adored and revered.
Watch that young face, tragically molded:
the smallish girl to whom that singer upon the stage,

Is everything, is all.

His songs she had lived,
His music culled from the pain
that worldliness had nurtured,
and burrowed into cracks,
Of an incandescent soul.

For one brief, sun-touched moment,
Their eyes entwined,
And suddenly the young man's anguish
slid effortlessly, sadly,
She cried out just then.
The splintering rush of truth
that burst the star,
that light-encircled star
Into cool, feathery nd ethereal dust.

Death, in its dark-cloaked self-righteousness
is forever indescriminant,
and it never plays any favourites with the wildly famous.BR> As it plucks flowers from Nature's shrine,
and leaving them to wither and die in the summer sun.

"Why you!" The girl wept chokingly,
"You possess nearly every gift
that life metes out to us.
She cried openly at last,
The tears of rage and anguish,
long held in check,
long ambitiously repressed.

Released from the cramp-quartered prison,
her emotions poured thickly out,
relentlessly and tumultuously.
Her idol was fading,
And slowly, his striking candle of light,
would funnel downward into murky chasms,
of endless, eternal

Nothingness.

But the artist had taught that child well:
never hesitate and wonder
what creative lights smolder within.
Death, that purveyor of jokes,
And cruel twists of irony,
Can bleed that life of hope and promise,
from our corporal selves,
long before,
The words have been spoken aloud.

And she thanked her mentor of sorts,
from the depths of light and shadow,
standing erect on the fog-shrouded but sturdy bridge,
She waved a touching

Good-bye.
Jane Wanklin
1997.