"Hair," by Micah Freeman

At a poetry reading organized by Cy-Press Poetry at Thunder-Sky, Inc. last week, Micah Freeman read this beautiful poem about Amy Winehouse.  We wanted to share it...

HAIR

"Physical ain't even my type." -Amy Winehouse


Me and Amy Winehouse are eating a sandwich together and being followed. "Sandwich," she says.

"Next door, let's go." Funny Games is being filmed shot for shot. Most of the time I want to ask Amy
about the weather but we discuss sandwiches instead. By the time we get to the weather we're already in Louisville. Driving around. Collecting every copy of the Gremlins series on VHS. Burning them at the Speedway. Get hype off horse race long passed. We start working together. She talks about her lunch she brought or a spinach ricotta pie. I know she hates the pie though. It's been two years. We scratched the shit out of our hood. "O' Dunes," Mountain Dew tempts us both. We start wearing yellow flip flops. There is no gate keeper for all the Ipods and Wonderlands. How many people are going, it's like who's going paint balling.

Me and Amy have enough room/puppies.

Start staring off into space. "I absolutely agree." Assess the situation. Me and Amy, a war going on, Cadillac's crashing into each other, doesn't know them as well, nothing last is forever, so we cut our losses, and open some Tanqueray. The Lord of Cars intersects with our lunch. I love Amy but today we're in trouble.

We've been through a lot. The cards are stacked. Lay against them motionless against us. This is the end I know. Me and Amy eat candy just like honey. We've tried everything.

We live in a landfill but Amy's happy as long as she's got a green cushion couch or bed. We bathe all day on this particular day we can't get a break. We're picking up dust and silos get to the side of us. Amy wants to run in that. I'm sorry Amy, you're bathing with a green cushion. We lay back and enjoy the panoramic view, the chance of the landfill being a fragile environment. Amy produced a dune. It went to Detroit. We both looked at a note in Farsi. Tried to make a license plate brochure from scratch. We eat some tic tacs and watch the hitch hikers grow beards and teeth. We slowly drove around it. Amy, if they would have known you had your choice between the U.S. Europe & Israel. "Yeah." Do you have Wisconsin?

It's being ripped out of my mouth. Amy Winehouse is the best. Of all people, sometimes I take forever,
using the bathroom with Amy Winehouse. I have a lens. It will exit you. That is correct, Me and Amy get some ice cream. Me and Amy come home from work early. We make jewelry. We are water animals.

"It's because there are so many variants, Amy. There are so many, that, do you do, dead to me, slashed in a recession, with one waterfall, if you met another it would be starting, I know that it's begging stop. A waterfall skips. Why heard two three going to get asked the question, bang. Me and Amy share a few slim jims and drink some white wine, rest in peace Randy.

Me and Amy are suddenly fried. We eat some grilled cheese. We secrete fun. All these dudes just walk on over there. Me and Amy go to a historic fish town.

Me and Amy eat some nicotine lozenges.

Me and Amy go fishing for nickel. We catch some pennies on the wall. Me and Amy go on a cruise. We hit on bald people. Somebody will want it. Me and Amy enjoy it. Me and Amy talk to two cute ladies.

Me and Amy wake up together week after week. We catch up mid day. Amy wants more tattoos, but it won't be enough combat. We need to introduce more hair spray and twenty seven beds to live. Amy glanced at me today, I thought, feral hint, I thought, but she just wanted her beat box and ice. I play piano in the next room. It's the most house like room in the building. My apartment leads in to the commons. The piano is surrounded by garments and rugs and a window in the middle of the out doors. It echoes perfectly. I can hear Amy going to town on a sweet track muffled through the wall. I strike the piano and we can't hear each other.

Every day it rains for one unmemorable minute especially. Acknowledged and forgotten, intermittent categorical rehash episodes that delve next door, out wafting the air, but never a drop of rain. A particular kind of notice every once a while. It's that deep deep hair that drives me back to Amy Winehouse. She forfeits a normal hair. It is deep and wide and tufts out, whirling about, she keeps her hands in it and shouts. She grows unusual, she says nothing to me. She will not come to this room. I play a piano track.

What she said to me was, are you having a good time Micah? I said, Amy, please.

If Amy is on the top than I'm in a pinecone.

Me and Amy want to color but we can't find a coloring book. I don't know a thing about it.

Me and Amy put two pieces together. We brush our teeth.

Me and Amy wear shoes. Prada and Jimi Hendrix wear us. Me and Amy walk around Kroger's with a watermelon.

It's Tuesday.

It's Wednesday.

My whole salty dogs in this game above the spin. Me and Amy spin city, airing hopes in that has always been obscenely hidden. On the catwalk under bridges. On a few imbedded exposures. Inbound, durable as my local Walgreens. Forever a hut reminds us.

Me and Amy got drunk last night.

Me and Amy enter liberation. We leave the city in a few, nothing to talk about. We leave and say goodbye with words.

I'm not sure I can write anymore about me and Amy. Our grid effaced with future maneuvers, heaving delicate membranes, caught up in the obvious and unreal. Me and Amy indifferently pick matching tattoos.

Me and Amy go fishing on time. When we aren't fishing we wear socks and dip our feet in the pool next to the piano. We love the cool sopping pool water clinging to our feet. The pool makes reflections against our front teeth. A pine falls in the pool with extra force. I speak for myself when I say we had a great time. I have a headache momentarily.

Me and Amy convince a police officer to take a scenic beach sunset photo with us. We grab my camera and we all stand together. It doesn't make sense for me and Amy to make a pontoon boat together.

We have no materials and share nothing. It would be sweet if me and Amy could split up the check. I feel like me and Amy are starring in Lost in Translation.

We both play some of the parts. The side characters and story and filming and production come together and clobber our fake history. We search each other out or somewhere filming in Japan. Me and Amy are waiting for the shoot. Me and Amy sketch each other more frequently.

Me and Amy buy a shirt that says "Me and Amy kissed the Moose, 2011".

Me and Amy eat a nicotine lozenge in the shower.

Me and Amy blow dry our hair. We look good.

Me and Amy see so much blue and go back. "I am alone just with two other people." With each piece that goes away, it gets a little easier. Me and Amy drive to Florida, stop at a gas station, get a coffee and vermouth. Drive in to the pines. We're both blue and lit like a flock in sky. "Do you know what travel means in an airplane?" "Don't you have to see two things?" Me and Amy have to meet in this no wake zone. Tis a good lake but equally squeaky. It's best not to ask questions so specific. We get dressed up, try really hard, and travel at night. I get back late tomorrow night. What's maneuver. There were moments where a celebrity would be talking to me, and I'd look at them, and they'd still be speaking, and I'd blink and hope that by the time I'd un blinked back to sight, you would have parachuted down through the thin limbs of the sappy pine needles and shouted, NO TIME TO REGRET and ran to BP and stole a bunch of lighters and sap from the trees.

Amy makes a rule about putting beverages next to electronics. We went to a restaurant. Coffee and vermouth. We watch a DVD. Me and Amy have something weird. We taste it. Me and Amy don't write in the book. You got sixty pictures of me and Amy. You got a picture with a backdrop.

"Jamaica & Spain"

And Then the Awe

Russell Brand has written a beautiful elegy to Amy Winehouse.  In the often stupid and meanspirited blogosphere, where jokes and juvenilia can sometimes be the most popular form of communication, Brand delivers a poetic, real, urgent, elegantly written paen to somone who was both a great artist and a tragedy.  Winehouse's dark-chocolate-and-red-wine voice has stained the world's white table-cloth:  it has the rudeness and staying power of primal myth.  God bless her and Mr. Brand both.

Here's the elegy:

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.


Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.

I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.

I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.

From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh.  She was “a character” but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers.  I was one of them; even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks, didn’t especially register.

Then she became massively famous and I was pleased to see her acknowledged but mostly baffled because I’d not experienced her work and this not being the 1950’s I wondered how a “jazz singer” had achieved such cultural prominence. I wasn’t curious enough to do anything so extreme as listen to her music or go to one of her gigs, I was becoming famous myself at the time and that was an all consuming experience. It was only by chance that I attended a Paul Weller gig at the Roundhouse that I ever saw her live.

I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I’d only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius.

Shallow fool that I am I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that youtube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.

Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.