THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

Ever since the days of perfectly fitted waistcoats silk top hats and the dangled kid glove when spring made its entrance as rowdy as a saloon, it became open season for desire. Inhibitions were lifted like a Crazy Horse skirt and for the pocket-empty artist, his swivel-eyed lust carried him by ragged foot   to the impossible distance of color-spattered fields, where armed with the seeds of paint, he tried to figure out the secret code of flowers which had spoken to him in the confidence of God since he was a child. With the genuflection of the Hog’s bristle brush and the consecration of the palette knife, the flowers were born out of creation--- becoming more human. with every stroke. Klimt’s sunflowers formed a soul Kusama made her blossoms quiver with the hallucinations of childhood and Van Gogh’s violet irises wept with madness from the asylum of Saint-Remy-de-Provence. And now after all these years the few that have survived be...

They were friends at that point, shoot the shit confidantes hoisting ale shots at McSorley’s as rain splattered the windows like Pollack paint  and sawdust added extra pulp  to their fiction. When she asked him  kind of casual, kind of not, why ghosts keep showing up in his poetry like the milky incandescence of long dead relatives, evaporated friends, and femme fatales who lowered the standards of his heart to that very moment he gave it a thought a seconds long inventory at best and answered: I don’t know, what do you think? She looked at him like she just solved a whodunnit and said I think it’s about hope… which stole his breath like a Times Square pickpocket and moved him to tears like  the first time he heard Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which guaranteed him safe passage right there in the saloon with its ususal crowd of diehards and tourists to enter his writing place where he conferred briefly with the spirits  who told him  to pack his mem...

After a life spent repairing his cowhide heart that has ruptured as often as a field of oil rigs in the Panhandle heat of an Amarillo summer, a gunslinger of some years, weathered to the amber of Old Overholt Rye, emerges from the final gasp of train steam. With a low-slung belt and spurs as rusted as him that jangle past the platform of twirling parasols that from space must surely look like daisies, he makes his way toward his long-promised reckoning— the high-noon showdown at La Misión de las Almas Perdidas— stopping twice: once to stroke a gentle horse, and once to catch his breath. And then he stands in the middle of the tree-lined crossroads, whose leaves, red as Malbec, cling to their branches like kinfolk in the Great Flood, praying, like him, to hold on one last time. But youth will outdraw him, and the wind will take the leaves. In the end, everything returns to dust, and the fragments left behind are all that light their trail to glory: ...

At first, grief is the blinding that greets me when I reach toward the total eclipse of a late-August sun for the one I’ve lost. The years drift by— muzzy— half-empty bed abandoned chair, and left-behind shoes still waiting for one more invitation to whirl beneath the fairy lights and moonwash of the eternal dance floor of bandstands, hopes, and dreams. Until grief— like my soul, and my refusal to forgive— softens into the long, low keening of a mother whale, her notes of longing bobbing along the salted complexion of the living sea— scatter-lit bottles of mercy and messages, each carrying the same heartfelt refrain: I miss you more.

My mom is mist now like the spray of Chanel that lingered in the atmosphere of her wrists and ankles from morning till night My mom is a distant moon now as luminous as the pearls that she wore on special nights when being pretty was her only fate. My mom is music now She’s Gertrude Lawrence still guiding young lovers wherever they are bone-skinny Frank in the wee small hours  Fred and Eleanor as they begin the Beguine My mom is in the clink of a china cup In the messages scrawled in the secret code of cake crumbs In the mumble of a soap opera In the plaintive whistle of a tea kettle  My mom is rage now As uncontrollable as she was When the shadows swallowed her whole. And my mom is sorrow now Like the moment her mom died when she stood crying  at the window that shut out the world and said in a voice much younger than mine, I’m an orphan now.   

 A Sunday Walk on  Fifth Avenue Written by David Steven Simon I’m on a 22-block winter walk moving with childhood velocity along Fifth Avenue. The sky is Tiffany blue which makes everyone feel as prosperous as a happy ending. My heart is that red balloon escaping like a convict above the Strand Books Kiosk moving to the madcap rhythm of the Red Maple Leaf rag I’m swallowed by the fanny pack of tourist wolves the sneaker hoofed stampede the merry prankster dogs and the unicorn girl in her multicolored finery City pilgrims pray to their phones led by a sacred calling as I am caught in the swirling tide of Puffers and Pashminas.  A homeless man soiled as a chimney sweep sleeps on church steps dreaming of his full belly past. A cardboard of hand-scrawled commandments lay at his charcoal feet offering hand scrawled instructions  on how to lead a more purposeful life I dodge The hand-holding strollers and The hands-pushing strollers with their acrobatic babies the Nicotine...