A Fanatic Heart: A Poem For Bono—By PJ
The Light You Brought To Me, watercolor by Kelly Eddington, 2025.
This was based on a screenshot from the video for Stuck In A Moment, where Bono is thrown repeatedly from a van, and he tumbles through space in a way that is graceful and sensual, and no one ever talks about it. This screenshot was taken when he sings “the light you brought to me,” and he was indeed sideways/upside down during that instant, so I MEANT TO PAINT HIM IN THIS POSITION. Gravity is affecting his face, and if you turn the painting so he looks like he’s right side up, it doesn’t work, I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. Happy birthday, fabulous muse.—Kelly
A Fanatic Heart: A Poem For Bono
PJ DeGenaro
Bono will recognize the title. Happy 65th birthday to him, from a certain type of fanatic.
A Fanatic Heart
I think of Dublin before the burnished stockades of multinational banks and sanitized hotels, an older city in which you float atop the Liffey, singing. The far shore is an abstract of low structures, sheds and tanks, and your song cuts strident and clean through the smell of water and dying industry.
Cinnamon pixie, your nose and neck are brave against the lichen-colored clouds, just bursting to rain and spoil your hair and leather vest. Before I knew better, I believed you had grown up on those docks, or close by in some narrow street. I imagined slum love-scenes, crumbling pavements, garbage raining down on us, like Sid and Nancy in a film that would not be made for another few years. Forgive me; I grow old and addled.
In the swamps of Long Island, summer of ‘85, I went out at night to avoid the fact of my father’s dying. (I was the only one who knew it would happen; no shock for me when the following winter it did.) My hairspray drew clouds of gnats that scattered before the door of the air-conditioned club. We all danced alone. The best boys wore black hats, white shirts, bolo ties and boots. They wanted to be you. I wanted them to be you, too. They weren’t.
What boy could imagine the black-haired siren you then became, bringing treasure from the sea to lonely girls who worked all day and lived in basements? Girls who turned on the stereo and dreamed of drowning to drenched songs of primordial ooze, a pulse throbbing under mother-of-pearl, shells and bones, cockles and mussels. Your newly-sharpened face, your patent leather and protean voice: Molly as a boy. I should have been tied to the mast, like brave Ulysses, or left to wander alone, like Bloom, through unfathomable Dublins in June.
At the turn of the century, your face honed sharp as bone, I watched from a distance as you planted your sturdiness in the center of the whirling flags, accepting back-pats from the Bravest and Finest, offering them some ballast in the new fear, a song loud enough to drown the funeral bagpipes that wailed through the city and up and out to the far suburbs. The new century was born in war – and war, surely as technology, would be its legacy.
Once, in the aftermath of a massacre of school children, I dreamed I sat beside you in a high meadow, riotous with wildflowers. Just out of sight: a tomb, piled with toys. I can’t look, I said. And I don’t know how to be good. You smiled at me. Your glasses were rose-colored. Of course they were. You don’t even blink now, do you, or even look away.
My forever pinup boy, my unlikely hero, at the far end of experience you’ve become a cinnamon pixie once again. Still, your face remains a perfect frame for masks: Comic and Tragic, devil and angel, your nose and neck brave against this new century of plague, war, and autocrats who bestride the narrow world like colossi. I have never been a fan of height. Give me a small man who squares up to bullies.