The amber sun bleeds out across the North,

A dying king upon a throne of gray;

We cast our shadows as we venture forth,

Two ghosts who seek the ending of the day.

Our shadows lengthen, stitched in ash and gold,

Two narrow banners trailing from our heel;

They cross the ruts where other footsteps rolled

And blur, as if deciding not to heal.

The salt will sting where light has failed to stay,

And brine shall fill the ruts our heels have torn;

For every ghost that seeks the end of day

Is but a king who fears to be reborn.

Q: The Fraud of Eternity is a compact, bleakly beautiful collection of poems that circles death, suffering, and spiritual exhaustion in the industrial landscape of Lowell, Massachusetts. Was this always intended as a thematic collection, or did it evolve organically?

Darryl Houston Smith: Honestly, it started from the ground up—literally. I didn’t sit down with some grand master plan to write a bleak treatise on spiritual exhaustion.

It was just me, reacting to the reality of Lowell. When the cold brick of the mills surrounds you, the gray teeth of the Merrimack, and that heavy quiet in the cemeteries, that kind of everyday decay gets into your blood.

At first, I was trying to capture that visceral darkness with as much raw honesty and sharp imagery as I could muster.

But as the pieces started piling up, all that chaotic emotion needed a cage. That’s where the thematic unity really took over. I found myself leaning heavily into strict ABAB and ABCB quatrains, using really dense, hyper-metric lines to rein it all in.

The project naturally evolved into an obsession with dualities—the tension between the sacred and the rotten, the living and the dead. So, while it absolutely began as an organic reaction to my surroundings, enforcing that rigid structure is what ultimately hammered it into the thematic foundation for the rest of the trilogy.

Q: Was there a specific emotional progression you wanted readers to feel?

DHS: Absolutely. The whole point was to make them feel the crushing weight of the oncoming reveal. I didn’t want to offer a gentle, healing arc—it had to feel like a slow, suffocating build. From the very first line, I wanted the reader to experience a creeping dread, a visceral sense that the floorboards of their faith are rotting out from under them.

It’s an emotional progression anchored tightly in those dualities I constantly return to.

You’re pulling the tension tighter and tighter between the sacred and the profane, between the living and the dead, until it simply snaps. By the time that final reveal hits, I want the reader to feel completely, physically exhausted—as if they’ve been dragged through the same heavy, industrial dark that birthed the poems in the first place.

Q: Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?

DHS: Oh, without a doubt. You can’t write about the rot of the modern soul without standing on the shoulders of the masters. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were constantly in my head—they understood how to drag unflinching truth and terrible beauty out of the gutter, which is exactly what I was trying to pull from the industrial ruins here in Lowell.

Then there’s Blake. He is the ultimate architect of dualities, that vicious tension between heaven and hell, which feeds directly into the dyads and strict structures I use to lock my poems together. Poe, naturally, gave me the blueprint for that creeping, psychological dread—the slow, suffocating build toward the dark reveal we just talked about.

And, of course, Jim Morrison. His influence is the bleeding edge of it all, bridging raw, visceral chaos with deliberate poetic intent. Since this collection is the bedrock of the entire trilogy, Jim’s shadow was always going to stretch across these pages. I wanted to take their collective darkness and compress it into something heavy, metric, and entirely my own.

Q: What does the phrase “fraud of eternity” mean to you personally?

DHS: To me, the ‘fraud of eternity’ is the great, comforting lie we’ve all been sold about salvation. We are taught to quietly endure the suffering of the present—the cold, the grit, the spiritual exhaustion of the daily grind—in exchange for the promise of some peaceful, golden forever. But it’s a scam. Eternity isn’t a transcendent afterlife; it’s the dirt of the cemetery. It’s the cold brick of the mills outlasting the flesh of the people who bled into them.

That phrase is about confronting the duality between the lie of heaven and the visceral truth of the grave. People want the romanticized comfort of the divine, but as a poet, my job is to look at the rot and call it what it is. The ‘Fraud’ is the false hope we use to numb ourselves to the present darkness. This collection is about stripping that hope away and forcing the reader to sit with the unflinching reality of our own decay.

Four ghosts, one script: the oldest scams in the world, dressed up for a new century of marks who still believe they’ve finally found the exception.

There are no new scams. Just the same old ones remixed and repackaged for a new generation of fools and greedy people. Still vigilant.

The masks are new, the velvet fresh,

The rot performs tonight;

Four ghosts return to walk the halls

And whisper through the light.

The Alchemist in neon glass

Would turn the lead to gold;

He claims the code can summon wealth

From vacuum, we are told.

The Prisoner calls from a glowing screen,

A ghost we’ve never seen;

He fattens hearts on hollow hope

Where intimacy has been.

The Ponzi rhythm beats its drum,

That “passive income” lie;

The early kings are fed by those

Whose futures bleed and die.

But darkest is the ancient fraud

That promises the name

Will live forever in the code,

Immune to history’s flame.

There is no permanence in stone,

No digital decree;

The crimson stain of honesty

Is our eternity.

The world grows more technologically complex, yet the human heart remains as vulnerable to the same three or four fundamental lies as it was in the days of the printing press.

Image: The trickster figure Reynard the Fox as depicted in an 1869 children's book by Michel Rodange

Baseball is the closest thing I’ve known to a family inheritance, and this stanza looks at what’s left when the heroes fade but the park—and its colors—remain.

I followed the fire from the islands to the hills,

And watched the Detroit clockwork turn the gear.

Then Lynn arrived in sudden, crackling thrills,

Of a summer no September could erase.

But names are ghosts that flicker in the sun,

And even kings must yield the emerald stage.

I traded the man for the colors of the run,

And bound my spirit to the weathered,

crimson page.

The Fraud of Eternity Audiobook arrives April 9th: a dark romantic, hyper-metric plunge into legacy, rot, and the small salvations we smuggle out of the void. There is a particular brand of rot that only grows in the dark corners of a family tree. We see it now, illuminated by the flickering screens of BritBox and the BBC, as the world dissects the corpse of Jack Wright’s legacy.

The series I, Jack Wright has become a sensation not merely because of its mystery, but because it refuses to blink, staging a murder inquiry inside a family already gutted by inheritance and omission. It offers an unflinching honesty about the transactional nature of love and the predatory nature of grief.

As I prepare for the release of my own collection, The Fraud of Eternity, I find myself looking past the television’s clinical framing toward something more primitive, more marrow-deep. In the show, the “will” is a legal document—a map of betrayal, revised in secret and detonated in front of the survivors. In my work, the “will” is the spirit’s desperate, often futile, attempt to bridge the dyad between the self and the void. Jack Wright is a patriarch who built a maze of contracts and conditional love; Jim Morrison was a shaman who built a labyrinth of myth and spiritual dare. Both men left behind heirs who are more haunted by what was omitted than what was given—the missing blessing, the withheld confession, the truth that never made it into the paperwork.

A will, after all, is never just a list of bequests. It is a final edit of the self, a last attempt to author how our absence will be read.Vivid decay vs. scripted silence. I, Jack Wright borrows the grammar of the true-crime documentary: talking-head confessionals, official records, a cool, investigative distance that promises the viewer safety while the family implodes onscreen. It is the aesthetic of “clean” tragedy—every horror buffered by a cutaway, a score, a neat timeline. Dark romanticism, by contrast, demands we step into the blood.

We are drawn to these narratives because we are tired of the polite lie. The procedural promises that if we collect enough evidence, the world will make sense again. The poem insists that the evidence was always inside us, contaminating every gesture.

We are all, in some sense, riders on a storm of our own making, thrown into a world already in motion and forced to improvise a meaning on the way down. Morrison’s storm carried a killer, a lover, and a mystic in the same body; Wright’s storm carries a titan of industry, a tyrant of affection, and a ghost who keeps editing his family from beyond the grave. In both cases, the legacy is less an inheritance than an ongoing crime scene.What fascinates us is not the wealth, but the weather—the psychic climate that formed around these men, the way their choices became a barometric pressure system no one in their orbit could escape. We crave the vivid, shock-value truth of our own isolation: the moment we see, with awful clarity, how much of our life has been lived in reaction to someone else’s unfinished business. The fraud of our legacies.

As The Fraud of Eternity finds its way into your hands this month, I am not offering a solution so much as a mirror. The television reflects the surface of the rot, letting us watch other families fracture from a safe distance. The poem aims for the marrow, insisting that every “will”—legal, emotional, spiritual—is also a question: What have you chosen to leave unsaid, and who will have to live inside that silence? We inherit storms we did not start. We draft legacies we cannot control. Somewhere between those two facts, a single, momentary, honest connection is still possible. That is the fraud, and the hope, of eternity.

The vaulted ribs of Boston’s ancient spine,

Are choked beneath a suffocating blaze;

Where stained-glass martyrs weep a bloodless wine,

And phantom armies shatter through the haze.

The cellos drag their marrow through the wood,

A guttural decay that strips us bare;

A shivering descent where heroes stood,

Now suffocated in the holy air.

We sit as corpses wrapped in heavy night,

Entombed within this counterfeit divine;

A fellowship of shadows starved for light,

Seduced by Sauron’s dissonant design.

The violins scream out a shattered grace,

A desperate plea, the altar casts aside;

We leave our rotting husks within this place,

And drown within the music’s

ruinous tide.

Images: JC Dennison.

Burning slow in glass; the Steel a street bound ghost,

While Mon and Alleg shadows glide unseen. A theater of carnage, curated, cold.

Where faith’s a compass lost at sea;

The arithmetic of losses, yet untold, That’s all the truth they keep for you and me.

So count the living as the engines die,

And sail beyond the charted blue of old.

We seek no pardon from the winter sky,

Just shares of guilt in black and gold

And one more coffin taken from the hold.

Image: AP News

“The three greatest all-around ballplayers that I ever saw were DiMaggio, Mays, and Kaline. – Billy Martin

That’s pretty good, Billy. Now the rest of yinz pull up a stool, youngsters, and some of your elders, too.

The Mirrored Giants

​While Clemente was the extravagant force of nature, Kaline was the consummate technician. Their careers ran on parallel tracks that reached the same destination: Cooperstown and the 3,000-hit club.

​The Defensive Standard: Both men were the gold standard for right-field defense. Clemente won 12 consecutive Gold Gloves, while Kaline won 10. They both possessed “cannons” for arms that dictated the flow of the game, forcing runners to hold at third on routine fly balls.

​The 3,000-Hit Milestone: They are forever linked by this magic number. Clemente’s 3,000th hit was his final regular-season at-bat in 1972, a tragic and poetic conclusion. Kaline reached 3,000 in 1974, becoming the first American League player to do so since 1925.

​The World Series Presence: Each was the heart of a championship team. Clemente’s 1971 World Series performance was a masterclass in “shock-value” talent, while Kaline’s 1968 Series victory was the crowning achievement of a career defined by Detroit loyalty.

​The Twin Sentinels

​A Poem for the Dyad of Right Field

​Two ghosts inhabit the sun-drenched patch of grass,

One carved of Caribbean fire, the other of Midwestern flint.

A pair of shadows where the foul lines pass,

Leaving behind a cold, statistical print.

In right field still, the throw arcs home.

​Roberto, the bad-ball king with the violent grace,

He swung at the dirt and found the distant wall.

A blur of gold and black, a haunting face,

Who turned the diamond into a cathedral hall.

In right field still, the throw arcs home.

​Al, the boy-king, precise and winter-lean,

Who wore the Old English D like a sacred shroud.

No wasted motion in the clockwork machine,

A steady thunder beneath a silent cloud.

In right field still, the throw arcs home.

​The lineage bleeds through the leather and the years,

To Gwynn’s clipped stroke and Ichiro’s laser-sight.

One took the geometry to calm the runner’s fears,

One took the violence to ignite the dying light.

​They are the blueprint, the heavy, ghost-filled draft,

The precision and the passion, the science and the soul.

A shared inheritance of the lonely, outward craft,

Where the parts are broken to make the dyad whole.

​One died in the waves, a martyr for the bread,

One lived to see his name on the award of the lost.

A dyad of right, by the same spirit led,

Calculating the game, regardless of the cost.

​They stand at the wall, arms cocked for the throw,

Mirrored giants in a league of fading light.

The high-metric pulse of the beauty they show,

Before the inning collapses into the night.

In right field still, the throw arcs home.

If you enjoyed this let me know in the comments and pass this along to a friend. Thanks Yinz

!

The warrant has been served, and Lost in the Labyrinth is now in your hands. But the architecture of any great myth contains sealed rooms—spaces that hold truths too volatile or too tragic for the primary narrative.

Welcome to the first Letter from the Labyrinth. In these dispatches, we will sift through the ash and examine the fragments that did not make the final cut. Today, we confront the silence of the Lost Portfolio.

In the chaotic aftermath of Paris, the public narrative demanded a tragedy of excess. Yet, a quiet encounter in Sausalito between the Beat poet Michael McClure and Pamela Courson revealed a profound truth that history has largely ignored. McClure recounted Pamela handing him a leather portmanteau containing the manuscripts Jim had produced during his final European exile.

McClure, knowing the state of the Shaman in his final days, expected a raw heap of chaotic, drunken fragments. Instead, he found perfect, terrifying symmetry.

The work was beautifully arranged. It had been meticulously edited not by Jim, but by Pamela.

The world is eager to dismiss Pamela Courson as a tragic enabler, the fragile junkie who facilitated the fatal dose. They ignore the brutal, beautiful dyad of her existence: she was the poison, yes, but she was also the ultimate curator of his mind. She understood the hyper-metric architecture of his verse better than the men who shared his stage. McClure was stunned by the coherence of the pages. He refused to take over the project, telling her, "Pam, I cannot do this... You are Jim’s natural editor."

It is a rare, devastating validation of their final dynamic. In those last months, the Queen of Cups had become the true guardian of his word.

Tragically, that specific artifact—the unified manuscript exactly as Pamela had curated it—has vanished. Like the poet himself, the master text slipped into the void. It was swallowed by the labyrinth, leaving us with only scattered, disorganized pages and the agonizing memory of what was almost preserved. We are left to wander the corridors, reading the graffiti on the walls, mourning a masterpiece that history carelessly misplaced.

https://books2read.com/u/baKO2P

The warrant was issued 57 years ago today. Here's why I spent two years in this labyrinth.

It began not as a biography, but as an excavation. For twenty-four months, I have lived in the suffocating, humid echo of that Coconut Grove hangar, breathing the stale air of a collapsed mythology. I did not want to write about the "Lizard King"; the world already has enough posters of a shirtless god trapped in leather armor. I wanted to autopsy the man who dragged a terrified lamb onto a stage to deliberately and methodically murder his own idol.

This work demanded a toll. You cannot spend two years dissecting the Solar Equation of Jim Morrison without getting burned by the sheer, radioactive proximity of his self-destruction. I traced the hairline fractures from the New Haven shower stall to the locked door of a Paris nightclub. I watched a brilliant poet construct a cage of his own design, and I documented the agonizing, drawn-out suicide of a persona that the audience demanded he maintain. It is a grim, exhausting vigil to stand watch over a ghost who refuses to rest.

But the architecture of the maze is finally mapped. The Minotaur has been laid bare, stripped of the celluloid lies and the sterile hagiography. The truth is

far colder, and infinitely more tragic, than the myth.

The gates are open. Step into the dark.

[Link to Lost in the Labyrinth]

The Gilded Abattoir

The chandelier is a weeping glassy eye.

Casts cold, pale light on ledgers of the dead;

Where once the silk-clad shadows used to glide,

The iron ghost of empire looms instead. The walls are masked in sheets of sterile white,

To hide the gold that mocked the coming storm;

Within this hollowed ballroom of the night,

The stark geometry of war takes form. We trade the waltz for each trajectory,

And toast to ruins in a fluted glass;

The ballroom mirrors bloom with tragedy,

As phantom legions through the doorway pass. The crown is heavy, and the floor is slick

With spilled red wine or what the earth will keep;

The clock upon the mantel stalls its tick,

While in the dirt, the silent millions sleep.

The Rising Stagnation

The canvas sags beneath a leaden weight,

Where kings must tread in inches of the flood;

A shallow sea to drown the head of state,

Before the desert drinks the deeper blood.

We spoke of peace while ankles turned to stone,

In silken tents that wept against the gale;

The water rose to claim the hollow throne,

As words of paper turned to sheets of mail.

The fluted glass is clouded by the breath,

Of men who wade through ripples of decay;

They measure out the dividends of death,

While washing all the silver salt away.

The tide is in; the ballroom floor is dry,

But in the tent, the stagnant spirits drown;

The storm we birthed now fills the evening sky,

To wash the gold from every dying crown.

Images: The White House

​An excerpt from Episode 1 of The Labyrinth Tapes

​History has painted Pamela Courson as the “cosmic mate,” the fragile, strawberry-blonde muse who stood faithfully in the shadow of the rock star. The reality was far bloodier. Their love was not a flower-child romance; it was a pact of mutual assured destruction.

​When Oliver Stone built his cinematic cathedral to the “Lizard King” in 1991, he created a myth of a solitary god breaking on through. He erased the brutal symmetry of the dyad. Pamela was not merely a passive observer of Morrison’s decline; she was a co-conspirator. She was a mirror reflecting his darkest impulses back at him with terrified intensity.

​The alchemy of The Doors relied on a fragile chemistry. To understand the “Solar Equation” of Jim Morrison, you must understand the vessel. He possessed a terrifying surplus of creative hydrogen—a nuclear chaos that required containment. In Los Angeles, the band provided the hard shell of the Chariot. But in Paris, the math changed.

​He sought refuge in Pamela’s world, the domain of the Queen of Cups. She represents Water—the only element capable of extinguishing Fire. When Morrison fled to the Left Bank, he wasn’t stepping into a sanctuary; he was stepping into an ocean that would slowly suffocate his flame.

​The “cosmic mate” myth ignores their gritty co-dependency: she needed his fame to sustain her lifestyle; he needed her chaos to validate his own suffering. They were the two halves of the same poison. The tragedy of Pamela Courson is that she survived him only long enough to cement the mystery. After allegedly facilitating the cover-up of his death, she returned to Los Angeles as the “widow” of the royalty she helped destroy.

​She died of a heroin overdose three years later, in 1974, also at age 27. She was buried under the name “Morrison,” taking the fiction of their marriage to the grave. They were finally united, not by ceremony, but by the shared needle that stitched their fates together.

​There is no Minotaur without the Labyrinth. And Pamela Courson was the architect of the final room.

The Mission

Riders of the Storm is the digital home of Dyad House, a chronicle of the journey through The Morrison Trilogy. Here, we move beyond the neon of the Sunset Strip into the textually dense shadows of the American Shaman.

The Duality

Expect a collision of vivid, shock-value imagery and hyper-metric prose. From the Baudelairean roots of Jim Morrison’s lyricism to the frost-bitten revelations of The Winter Dyad, this publication explores the tension between the myth we consume and the Fraud of Eternity we inhabit.

The Calendar of Scars

We do not publish on arbitrary dates; we publish on the anniversaries of fractures, warrants, and revelations. This year is a narrative arc, anchored to the ghosts that haunt this work:

March 5 — The Warrant is Issued: Lost in the Labyrinth arrives on the 57th anniversary of the Miami warrants issued against Jim Morrison.

April 9 — The Architect of the Dark: The Fraud of Eternity is born into the world on the birthday of Charles Baudelaire.

July 10 — The Tension Snaps: The Winter Dyad releases on the exact day Paul Verlaine fired a pistol at Arthur Rimbaud in 1873.

December 8 — L'Azur Noir: Our year concludes with a Bilingual Special Edition, dropping as the fires are lit for the Fête des Lumières.

What to Expect in the Interim

The Labyrinth: Behind-the-scenes insights into the research and obsession that fueled The Morrison Trilogy.

Dark Romanticism: Original poetry often following an uncompromising ABAB or XBYB structure, prioritizing emotional grit over comfort. Constraints aren’t limitations—they’re scaffolding. We are not here to float. We are here to build. Expect emotional grit over comfort.

The Shamanic Legacy: Deep dives into the 1960s counter-culture, the French Symbolist influence, and the archetypes that still bleed into the present day.

Enter the Labyrinth

Do not merely subscribe; bear witness. Every dispatch, every poem, and every piece of cultural excavation will be delivered directly to you, unfiltered and unyielding.

The Dyad Demands a Witness

Step into the shadows with those who share this uncompromising vision. Dissect the mythology with me in the comments, support the unflinching truth of this work, and walk the Calendar of Scars by my side.

To those navigating this endless, synthetic dark,

We are living in the echo of a collapse that began long before the digital age demanded our surrender. The ghosts of past decades have not been exorcised; they have merely been retrofitted with new, algorithmic machinery. What follows is an autopsy of that rusted mechanism—a dyad of prose and verse to remind us exactly what is swinging in the shadows.

The mechanism of history is not a clean, surgical blade; it is a bludgeon. The rust signifies a geopolitical and economic machine that has long outlived its utility—the dying, calcified remnants of the neoliberal architecture erected in the 1980s. Because it is rusted, it no longer cuts with precision; it tears, groans, and drags.

A fractured dyad bleeds across the suffocated sphere,

while gilded architectures choke on digital decay;

the rusted pendulum descends to harvest hollowed bones,

and spawn a thousand butchers in the ashes of the day.

The algorithmic cleavers gleam beneath a choking sun,

as fractured empires splinter into digital debris;

they mine the marrow from the ghosts of our forgotten wars,

and drown the dying epoch in a cold, synthetic sea.

By Darryl Houston Smith

The pendulum does not halt simply because we close our eyes to its arc. The mechanism thrives on our silence and our engineered exhaustion.

Descend into the comments below. I want you to name the butchers carving up your corner of this synthetic sea. Identify the algorithmic cleavers in your own lives. If we are to be caught in the wreckage of 1980 and 2026, we will at least do the butchers the disservice of looking them directly in the eye.

Stay awake.

Image: NBC News

The neural wires are frayed and stripped,

A circuit breaker’s sudden flare,

From silence where the secrets slipped,

Into the cold and public air.

The body acts a jagged part,

A frantic rhythm, sharp and loud,

The rhythmic beating of a heart

Exposed before a shifting crowd.

A sudden twitch, a vocal stain,

The spirit trapped within the frame,

A frantic sparking of the brain,

That gives the hidden ghost a name.

There is no grace in steady breath,

When nerves begin their wilder dance,

A struggle lived in life and death,

The victim of a

cruel mischance.

The air in the counting-house grows thin and cold,

Where the ghost of a king meets the ghost of a law;

The scepter of commerce, so heavy and bold,

Is clutched in a fist that the high benches gnaw.

The gavel descends with a hollow, dry crack,

A tremor that shivers the marrow from stone;

The six in their vestments have driven time back,

And peeled the commander to cartilage, bone.

They speak of the crisis—half fever, half fraud,

A scapegoat invoked with a surgeon’s deceit;

The treasury’s skin is incision and clod,

The coin is the pulse that declines at the seat.

The border is bloodless, the tall ships don’t sail,

Their hulls full of phantoms and furnace-black ore;

For the tariff lies headless, unhooked from its nail,

And the engine of power is howling for war.

The halls of the Congress are dusty and deep,

Awakened from slumber by robes of the dark;

The promises made while the sentinels sleep

Are scattered like ash from a dying, red spark.

He promised a wall built of silver and toll,

A barrier woven of duty and spite;

But the law is a dyad of body and soul,

And the soul has retreated from the edges of night.

The six have remembered the parchment’s cold line,

The three are the chorus that echoes the strain;

The grapes of the harvest, the blood of the wine,

Are no longer squeezed for a singular gain.

The emergency fades like a fever at dawn,

A phantom necessity, hollow and gaunt;

The pieces are moved, but the King is a pawn

To the ancient restrictions that spirits still haunt.

The docks of the city are grey with the mist,

Where the crates wait for mercy or ruinous cost;

The hand that was raised in a defiant fist

Is counting the moments and everything lost.

It is the theology of a universe mute,

Where the authority crumbles in silence and shame;

The tree is still standing, but bitter the fruit

When the tax is a burden without a true name.

The ledger is balanced by hands that are cold,

In the temple of Justice, where dualities dwell;

The story of tariffs is a story twice-told,

A ringing of bells in a bottomless well.

The emergency dies as the sunlight breaks through,

To reveal the machinery, rusted and still;

The power was borrowed, the debt is now due,

And the law is the master of even the will.

Image: AP News

The wait for the first installment of the Morrison Trilogy is nearing its end.

As we approach the Vernal Equinox and our celebration on World Poetry Day (March 21st at lala books), I am pleased to announce that The Fraud of Eternity is now available for pre-sale everywhere books are sold.

This collection is a descent into the "dark romanticism" of our own backyard—from the neon ghosts of the Flamingo Lounge to the hyper-metric rhythms of a life lived in the shadow of the Lizard King.

Heaven is vapor. Hell is solid. It’s here.

Secure your copy today and join me in March as we hand out the first 20 keys to the labyrinth.

https://books2read.com/u/baKO2P

As I watched the Archivists celebrate Lady Day, I saw the Wolves in the headlines beginning their ritual dismantling of another icon—Michael Jackson. It brought me back to a concept I have long wrestled with: The Child in Suspension. Whether it is the "velvet rasp" of Billie in the Flamingo Lounge or the "phantom" voice of Jackson on an unearthed tape, the machinery of the industry remains the same. They build a sanctuary, they dare to speak a truth (be it "Strange Fruit" or a song for Palestine), and the world responds by turning their sanctuary into a cage. We are witnesses to a market where sorrow is the primary currency, and innocence is the ultimate liability.

The Child in Suspension (The Channel 4 Remix)

The king is caught within a gilded snare,

A phantom playing on a field of glass;

The wolves are scenting incense in the air,

And watch the seasons of the spirit pass.

He builds a world where winter never bites,

To shield the small from shadows at the gate;

But monsters masquerade in neon lights,

And seal the “child in suspension’s” fate.

The lawyers sing in velvet-cloaked deceit,

While cameras drink the tremor in his voice;

The boardroom saints anoint his wounded feet,

Then sell his sorrow as a market choice.

So hangs the child between the cross and screen,

A saint of profit, frozen and unseen.

The unearthed voice, a ghost upon the wire,

Is dragged again before the neon glare;

To feed the furnace of the market's fire,

And strip the sacred remnants to the bare.

The wolves still scent the incense in the wind,

Where profit blooms from what the world has sinned.

Michael Jackson: The Trial - Official Trailer

https://share.google/Yvd6u1q6uA8VConGk

In 2005, Michael Jackson was acquitted of all 14 charges in a highly publicized child molestation trial, with jurors citing weak evidence. A 2026 Channel 4 documentary, Michael Jackson: The Trial, revisits this case using exclusive footage, new testimony, and unheard audio tapes to explore the media circus, his life, and the legal battle.

Image: BBC News