CHER
I wanted to be Cher, tall
as a glass of iced tea,
her bony shoulders draped
with a curtain of dark hair
that plunged straight down,
the cut tips brushing
her non-existent butt.
I wanted to wear a lantern
for a hat, a cabbage, a piƱata
and walk in thigh high boots
with six inch heels that buttoned
up the back. I wanted her
rouged cheek bones and her
throaty panache, her voice
of gravel and clover, the hokum
of her clothes: black fishnet
and pink pom-poms, frilled
halter tops, fringed bells
and her thin strip of waist
with the bullet hole navel.
Cher standing with her skinny arm
slung around Sonny’s thick neck,
posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,
The Leaning Tower of Pisa,
The Great Wall of China,
The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling
for the camera with her crooked
teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun
bouncing off the bump on her nose.
Give me back the old Cher,
the gangly, imperfect girl
before the shaving knife
took her, before they shoved
pillows in her tits, injected
the lumpy gel into her lips.
Take me back to the woman
I wanted to be, stalwart
and silly, smart as her lion
tamer’s whip, my body a torch
stretched the length of the polished
piano, legs bent at the knee, hair
cascading down over Sonny’s blunt
fingers as he pummeled the keys,
singing in a sloppy alto
the oldest, saddest songs.
Dorianne Laux
8 comments:
I'm pretty sure the Van Halen thing has been done, at least the David Lee Roth one...by me :)
Found the following on a blog. Interestingly, Laux evidently wrote HER poem originally from a prompt!
"Laux wrote "Cher" after he husband Joe Millar gave her 10 words and told her to use them while saying something she'd wanted to say but hadn't. Laux took the chance to talk about her Cher envy."
http://courses.csusm.edu/ltwr325bc/Cher.html
Steve: I know you've been writing about rock bands/stars since way back. Always loved your Bay City Rollers poem.
Great story, David--thanks for sharing. Sometimes the best poems begin from exercise challenges.
Laux's is better, but here's mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rot5OtllQ9w
Bill -- I loved your Song to Cher. Check it out, everyone!
Here's an old one of mine--
Ray Charles On Late Night TV
That nonstop rhinestone grin
undimmed by the decades,
though the hair is frosty gray
and the face a bit grizzled--
he whips out the intro
to What'd I Say, as
the latest Raeletts
sway against their tambourines,
and I nearly forget how many
thousands of nights
he's leaned into the mike
to growl I want to know,
how many car radios
have pulsed with his cries
in Michigan, in Tennessee,
unhh and ohhh--what Ray said.
Tell it, brother. We're not
really listening. We're
squirming across the back seat
in a hilarious tangle
of unbuckled belts,
bra straps, and frantic hips.
We're doing the backbeat,
we're wailing the blues
right into rock-and-rollville.
And Ray's still presiding,
with demon grin and mirrored shades,
like he sees it all.
--David Graham. Egg (Spring 1997).
David: thanks for posting. This one gives me a good kind of chills.
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