"Strangers, in Many Ways..."

Over-exposed, artificially ardent – this
record of visceral dissonance – visually
disconcerting, off-kilter: those blank
haunted eyes – lit by midnight –
reflexively hunting – devoid of surprise:
caught in her silently clattering scaffold
of skeleton – awkwardly pushing
against some internalized fence behind

which she'd stood terrified: how many times
had she died like this, swaying onstage
while she lip-synched her own preternatural
calm – that unearthly dark feminine
baritone sound – so polished and easy
and done to a turn: the brilliant precision
of studio-technic perfection, all earned
through repeating, repeating, repeating

until she acquired that aurally bodiless
beauty – vibrato so subtle – voice deep
and so still and so cut off from her. I cannot
today keep from viewing, reviewing
the YouTube performance of her strained
performance of her secret paradigmatic
enormously odd enigmatic performance
of soul. Seen through so many lenses,

how could she be whole? Not so different,
now, from a sense of the shattering strange
lack of “how” I’ve afflicted myself with this
week: as if any capacity I might have had
to prevail had just sprung a malevolent leak.
Karen Carpenter got to where she couldn’t
eat: hellishly branding herself as unlovely,
unlovable – fathomably incomplete.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH-xF1A9PS0

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