The Sixteenth Chapel

If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth
chapel, I’m not either. I admit he is my role
model. He’s so current, so fresh and so new,
and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.
Where is the love in those old paintings? All
I see is creation, judgment, and death—

and I don’t get the preoccupation with death.
I’m about life! Ever since my sixteenth
birthday, when me and my two sisters all
nearly died when the car I was driving rolled
into a creek. Even though I’ve forgotten the date,
I think it keeps me thinking on the new,

something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.
I look at him, and see the opposite of death
in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday
he may be a father, and later host a Sweet Sixteen
for his daughter (who I know he’ll buy a Rolls),
death will never find him. Living will be all

he’ll ever do, because it will be all
he’ll ever need to do. He is the eternal new,
the forever youth: this is the simple role
of every celebrity, to let us forget death.
Bieber didn’t make a mistake on the Sistine
Chapel’s name. He merely showed that someday

all old names must go, that on some day
a name must die so that the thing, which is all
that matters, can stay as it was in the sixteenth
century: fresh, ostentatious, and brand new.
In a way, the name becomes a Christ, experiencing death
so the world doesn’t have to. But I am wary of this role

for a name. It seems a name gives meaning, rolls
the general idea together with the concrete, daily
toil of the mundane. Are not life and death
intertwined? Is not everything tied up all
with everything? I guess I’m saying the new
necessarily comes from the old, as every sixteen-

year-old has a parent. Life rolls to death, and all
is tied together. Each day is born of night, and dies so new
morning can occur. Even the sixteenth chapel holds death.