Lying there
In all your vulnerability,
In your featherbed littered with broken glass.

A hard, lean object of mettle,
You tenaciously chipped away the shyness
And the hints of baby fat,
Until it all crumbled away at last,
Into a powdery, white dust.

Your blood is mixed with the salted sweat,
Dribbling over an otherwise stoic, non-communiatvie casing,
But yet,
Through all of this,
You smile and wave, a puppet in some child's grasp,
And listened to the lung-swelled cheering as you always did.

You seem, dear Michael, to snuggle securely in the filmy belief,
That you are one with them; that you are on an even footing.
But we know differently, and we cry for what is lost to you.

You've pared yourself down to the least of proportions,
Shedding excess as it slowed your frenetic pace and made you stop And really thnk at what fame and fortune had cost you.

Still, when I gaze up at you,
Shivering in Athens' ninety degree summer heat,
Your wraithlike figure darting in among the town's landmarks,
I cry, for I realize that no-one can embrace and stroke lovingly,
A projected image

That isn't really there.

Jane Wanklin
1997.

This poem is how I see that fame affects the idolized. It is not all a lush garden of sweet-smelling roses. Although he suffers, as far as any of us know, from any major "dark nights of the soul", it must be very difficult to be invisible.

Then, if he pares himself down as if to become unseen by the probing eye of the public and the media, he kind of loses himself. That is just how I see him, through the smokey eyes of the borderline.

This ends Part Three of my R.E.M.-inspired chronicles, a poem for Michael