•Michael Jackson

Lord, here lies the body of your son, Michael Jackson. Here lies he that you created a little lesser than the angels and blessed with talents unsurpassable.
He that you ordained from above to be a king over us. King of pop! Now he has popped out of our lives. Just like that. In a lavender morning mist of grief. Now you make me speechless. What can I say? What poem would I write?

You gave him. You took him. You brought us joy. Then you broke our hearts. God, how fearfully beautiful you are in the awesome power of your majesty! You who makes and unmakes! You who creates the beat and stops the heart from beating. At your own will and in your own time. I fear you, you Ancient Mariner, you Ancient of Days.

Here lies the body of the king, our king. The king is dead. The king of pop is gone. When cometh another?
Lord, here lies Michael Jackson. The Michael Jackson whose music brought the world joy. The Michael Jackson whose melody brought the world peace. The Michael Jackson whose dancing steps defied physics and the laws of motion. Michael Jackson who walked backwards on the surface of the moon. Michael Jackson, the moonwalker.

The Michael Jackson of the We are the World fame. Now the music maker is gone. Now the dancer extraordinaire is gone. Gone even when his music is still playing at its loudest crescendo.

All of a sudden he is gone. Gone just like that. Gone with the wind. Gone like a comet. Gone too soon. Gone with a bang, not a whimper. Gone like Elvis Presley. Gone like Jimi Hendricks. Gone like John Lennon. Gone the way of all flesh. Gone into the dust of the early beginnings when God first created Adam from nothingness. Gone from the troubles of his troubled world. Gone from his massive debts. Gone from foreclosures. Gone from the global meltdown. Gone from swine flu and bird flu. Gone from the Pandora’s Box of troubles.

Gone for good. And what we have left is sorrow. A world awash with sorrow. A world drowned in dirges and songs of lamentations. The lamentations of Job. The lamentations of Solomon. He who was our David, our boy-king dancing with the Ark of the Creator. Our psalmist chasing away our Beelzebub and our morbid melancholia with his soothing lyre. Our musical healer, singing: “Heal the world, make it a better place/For you and me and the entire human race.”
He was just one of a kind, one of a million, one of a billion. Unparalleled. Unmatchable. Unique.
Now, the sky and the stars are all truly yours. Now, the clouds and the heavens would walk under your magnetic feet. May you eat your fill of the heavens in your 50 years of self-inflicted hunger!

Lord, our brother Michael Jackson is gone. Gone to join the angels. Gone to lead the choir of angelic voices that would sing God to sleep in His eternal sleeplessness. Gone to dance for God. God, what you have is the finest dancer that ever lived since you created the world many light years ago. He is gone. Gone in the summer of June. Oh, June, the bearer of bad tidings!

June, like April, “is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” (T.S. Eliot, The Burial of the Dead)
God, so Michael Jackson is gone? Michael Jackson is dead and now, the Angel of Death can laugh. You can hear Death having the last derisive laugh at the end of Michael Jackson’s Thriller song. Come on, play the Thriller and you will hear the deadly laughter of Doctor Death, laughing ha, ha, ha, ha, ha in the laughter of the grand finale.

In Thriller, Michael Jackson must have foretold his own death. Or how else would you explain a Michael Jackson in a red jacket, dancing in that horror video with the tribe of the dead, dancing with zombies amidst the “funk of 14,000 years”?
Lord, here lies Michael Jackson in the sleep that ends all sleep. Here lies Michael Jackson in his prophesied “final curtain call” that really turned out to be final. Let’s beware of what we say, because there is power in the tongue.

Here lies Michael Jackson, the revolutionary. Michael Jackson, the benchmark, the standard setter. The misunderstood. The madman man with a method. The Wacko Jacko dangling his baby from a window in a mock baby-strangling. The man of horror. The man in the mirror. The man with the face of a ghost. The man long dead before his final death. The man who made an oxygen coffin his abode. The anthropoid Mike who chose a chimp as his friend and bed mate. The masked man. The goggled man. The gloved one. The androgynous star bridging the boundaries of race, colour and sex.

A strange man. A great man. A great man beyond measure. A nice man. A man for all seasons. A man of contradictions. The paradox. The child-lover turned the accused child molester hopping into courts in a pyjamas. The chameleonic songbird who can mimic many voice ranges, from the falsetto to the alto to the tenor.
The songbird. The bard. The bad bard singing of his own badness: “I’m bad, I’m bad, who’s bad?” The record maker. And the record breaker. He sold more record than any in the history of recording. The thrill and the Thriller. Can you beat his record? Can you “Beat it?”

Here lies Michael Jackson, the kindergarten child star who taught the world the ABC, doh-ray-mee and the 123 of singing. Michael Joseph Jackson is his full name. And be careful what name you give your child. Because names could be prophetic. Michael Joseph Jackson. The Joseph who came “Off the Wall” to outshine his singing brothers. The Joseph who thrilled Pharoah’s wife in Egypt. Now, “Do You Remember The Times?”

Like the biblical Joseph, he was the dreamer, who dreamt that his brothers were bowing to him. Today, the whole world is still bowing to this Joseph, the ruler of Egypt and the world’s king of pop. King alive and king forever. Even in the grave he is still the king of pop. His music would rule the airwaves forever. The king is dead. Long live the king. May your works live after you. May your record continue to sell more and more, even after you have gone.

From you, we learnt the motivation to be the best in everything.

You were simply the best. The best singer. The best entertainer. The best dancer. The best performer. The best choreographer. The best hit album of all times. You “Can’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” That is Michael Jackson for you, the superlative superstar who grew to be a bigger megastar in life and in death. Sleep well, my beloved, our beloved. In the opened door of your prison, sleep well in your new-found freedom.
And may God forgive and repair your broken heart, your broken face and your broken nose!