Poem of the Week

Scars: An Open Letter to Hollywood from Heath Ledger
By Marshall “Soulful” Jones



If you're here, he's not Im not And I’m sure you'd like to know why we're not Ill tell you.... He loved her And she's not here right now because of you ....Fame is a disease We all got it We're all sharing needles with it If you're not careful

You will die before you die

I mean, look at us
NO!
NO!
Silly!
Put the suicide note down
AND LOOK AT US

Look at all the bottles on the floor
Half of these things I cant even pronounce
But
Did you notice Xanax reads the same forward and backward?
No
I thought it was funny
Anyway
Apparently my apartment on Broome st
Did not sweep enough under the rug
So now you see what you've done
Now you know how I got these scars
See the camera keeps rolling
Like a wheel
Turning your insides
You cant have a normal life
Without a production team
With a search warrant for your bad day
How many tabloids do you think it took to ruin him
How many gossip sites did it take?
How many lines of cocaine do you think we need to forget
That everyday we're getting farther and farther away from EVERYTHING
We love
Oh you thought he was acting?
Oh You think I'm not real
Oh I’m real
REEL TO REEL
And when you 're sick with fame like him
You need people like me to keep you laughing
So when the lady left with everything
I said Why So Serious
Just take two Ambien
Those are good for the nightmares
Take one of these
Two of those
A whole #%^#$%& of these


I kept the bathroom cabinets jokes coming

Because Painkillers can shove your mistakes off a balcony
And you can still smile about it
You think you know him
You don't
I was there
I was there to tell him that if were gonna go anywhere
We were gonna go out with a bang
So WHY SO SERIOUS!



It’s a Friday night at the Nuyorican Poetry Café. All of us are tipping elbows and sucking in as much air as possible in order to fit in the space we managed to claim. Mahogany L. Browne, the host of every Friday night, introduces Marshall Soulful Jones. Paper in hand, he utters the title of his poem in his natural voice. No one is prepared for what is able to unfold.

A resurrection occurs in the chambers of his throat. Twitch. His voice becomes the narrator of every nightmare you ever had as a child. Twitch. The tilt of his head allows shadows to sit underneath his eyes. Twitch. The helpless sheet of paper is strained and caressed between bipolar fingers. Twitch. This is not the same man Mahogany introduced seconds ago…

Soulful Jones becomes the reason why The Dark Knight became a blockbuster hit. He becomes the character we wished we got more of; he takes on the persona of The Joker. This villain’s lunacy is underscored by the influx of his tone and the disorientated speech. This poem erases the line between Heath Ledger and The Joker. Fame and it’s entourage of drugs, stress, and lack of privacy pushes Ledger to the point of insanity. The rhetorical question, “Oh you thought he was acting?” verbally assails Hollywood’s ignorance and neglect of failing to acknowledge clear the indications of much needed assistance.

Hollywood ignores those that define it.

-Joel Cruz