Sergeant Harry Fagel has seen things you can’t forget, like a ten-inch serrated Rambo-style knife plunged into a woman’s vagina and left inside to bleed her to death.
He’s seen the hookers, the homeless, all the things that we know go bump in the night on downtown streets and in hotel rooms, parked cars and suburban track homes. He’s been a Metro cop specializing in vice (prostitution), narcotics, robbery and homicide for 15 years and has lived in Vegas for 40 years, his whole life.
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- "Vegas Part 7" by Harry Fagel
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- "Jay-sahn's Deli" by Harry Fagel
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- "Doo Doo" by Harry Fagel
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He looks hardcore, hulking like a WWF wrestler with a shaved head, often packing guns under his off-duty t-shirt. He looks like he could kick your ass. But Harry is a poet, a lover of the arts and culture and Vegas, a family man with a powderpuff heart.
“People see a poet as this soft sensitive liberal writer that sits in a room somewhere and writes poetry, but that’s not what poetry is,” says Fagel. “Poetry is a visceral representation of passion and emotion and life. In the job that I do I see a lot of things that are burdening to the heart; they are heavy on the heart. Poetry is a way to help myself release those things for myself and help myself to understand the pain that we experience in this world.
I go back to the ancient times of the shogunate when they had these guys that worked for the shogun. They were warriors, but they also created poetry and created architecture and did things that balanced out the violent, visceral side of what they do.”
More
- From the Calendar
- First Friday, Nov. 7
- Beyond the Weekly
- About Harry Fagel
Fagel, the modern shogun warrior, will be performing his poetry at First Friday tonight at 8:30 p.m. as part of Operation Desert Word Storm! (6 p.m.-10 p.m.). On the Showmobile Stage at California and Casino Center, Fagel will be joined by two-time National Individual Poetry Slam Winner Anis Mojgani, Alaskan fiddling poet Ken Waldman, traditional Hawaiian musician and surf bard Gary Haleamau, African-influenced storytelling group Modern Griot, India-born poetess Mani Rao, hyper-literate indie-rock act Big Friendly Corporation, The Killers saxophonist and fiction writer Tommy Marth and Zeitgeist Press publisher and poet Bruce Isaacson.
Fagel has published two book of poems, Street Talk and Undercover, free verse riddled with swear words and pungent with sex and drugs. In December he is releasing the CD Word Murder, a stab-you-in-the-heart combination of the spoken word and music of local rock band The Vermin with saxophonist of Tommy Marth of The Killers.
Downtown by Harry Fagel (from Undercover)
The freaks around here
Multiply like rabbits on ecstasy
Bouncing and bubbling from gutter to gutter
Whacked out on anything found
Kill you for a dollar
Fuck you for twenty
Take you to hell or heaven
Your choice for cash or
Equivalent
Some mutter endlessly
Litany of devil speak spilling from glass pipe burned lips
Others speak inward
Eyes ricocheting from nowhere to noplace
All backs bent from weight of suffering
No one truly erect
Buttressed against unseen winds that blow in from psychic black
Holes
Rippling dime store clothes
Black with sadness
The air is a sellers market
Dope bazaar
Puss bazaar
Alcohol the only legal tender here
Poured eagerly and forever past smitten faces
Desperation is a smog
Tangible and credible and poisonous
Hanging around Downtown like a rancid cowl
The tourists stare into tragic mirrors
Seeing only themselves or neon light reflected
Passing grief with nary a glance
Distracted by dollar beer and free coffee shop food exchanged for
Gambling
They are victims occasionally
But not as often as crime tv would have one believe
Instead most of the rot is turned inward
Poor slashing poor
Hungry starving hungry
Tiny drams unfolding with the rhythmic heartbeat that is
Las Vegas
Sirens echoing slightly washed out from helicopter backwash
Maybe an ambulance wails or perhaps it’s just another shocking
Moment
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