A month before The Stooges released Fun House
They sit behind stage
Imbibing piles of downers, uppers, and anything in between
While a sea of heads crashes into Crosley Field.
James Osterberg takes a handful of tabs
Of Orange Sunshine,
The same Orange Sunshine
That Charles Manson used when “Helter Skelter” made sense.
James strolls onto the stage and becomes
A man he calls
Iggy Pop. Shirtless, with a dog collar and silver gloves,
he convulses, gyrates, moves his body in the most disturbing manner.
Belting out “TV Eye,” holding the audience
In the palm of his hand, he leers over them.
The announcers broadcasting his image to the nation
refuse to understand what he is.
Jumping the five feet between crowd and stage,
Iggy growls the lyrics to “1970.”
Steve Mackay’s saxophone drones and Iggy pulls himself,
Climbing up people’s bodies, their hands grasping for his legs,
One glove missing as they hold him, standing
On their hands above the crowd. He is cemented as Iggy
on a platform of palms, becoming something of a god.
A terrible god with
Loose morals, a body full of acid,
And a jar of peanut butter that he scoops from,
Smearing the crowd, in the strangest ritual since Ash Wednesday.
Slinging smooth Jif in a peanut butter baptism,
Iggy absorbs the crowd which,
To him,
Is a sea of amorphous appendages and bobbing head buoys,
Emitting a red-yellow sound in his direction.
While these people witness something their kids
Would appreciate more than they ever did.
Jonathan Krystopolski, originally from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, is a senior at the University Park Campus studying political science, philosophy, and creative writing. He has previously been published in “From the Fallout Shelter,” where he won the Editor’s Choice Best Poem Award, and “Fission.” When he isn’t staying up all night doing homework or writing, Jonathan can be found playing D&D and spending money he doesn’t have on his record collection.