THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

There have been A lifetime of dances. The belly dance delivery  The late-night sway The pram-driven air kick The baby pub crawl The first step wobble The handheld promenades The flirtation with waves  The first snow prance The Green-Mile stroll  on the first day of school The years later, Spring Festivals Where it felt thrilling to  Move   with girls Whose dresses rustled  like the tissue paper And ponytails galloped in the wind. The Junior High Friday night-grinding The High School backseat tango  The college dorm seductions The one-knee proposal The very first gambol as Mr. And Mrs.  Which led to  The samba of fights The tango of concessions The waltz of apologies The turning away  When you knew it was over And now all that is left.  Is the choreography of remorse and a dance card filled with second thoughts Until one day In the first-born hours of the afternoon  The ghost Of someone you lost will rise like a mystery to Debussy’s  Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faun And offer you a hand

On An Autumn Day Like This Written by  David Steven Simon On an autumn day like this when the leaves  shed their modesty and change like flirty high school girls in a doors wide open pastoral dressing room emerging as scarlet women only to retreat and return in their anorexic bare branch winter clothes I sit  on this pine-slatted Central Park bench autographed by lovers  painted by pigeons and long for the days when everyone was still here until they began to disappear And I was left an orphan of the late November darkness waiting for the light to return which makes  what lies ahead as heartbreaking as goodbye and as fragile as forever.

  I’m on a 22-block  Fall escalator ride Moving with childhood velocity The sky is Tiffany blue Which makes everyone feel As prosperous as a happy ending My heart is that balloon Which floats over the Strand Bookstore kiosk with its novel-excavating archeologists As the Agnes de Mille of the wind   Shows it how to do the Red Maple Leaf rag As I am enveloped by the swarm of Columbuses discovering America The fanny pack of wolves The sneaker hoofed stampede The unicorn-fed girl in her multicolored finery The Mickey Mouse rat race The merry prankster dogs who prance like ponies as their wagtails keep time like metronomes The heads down flock, pray to their phones Lourdes knows why As I am passed by The Pashminas The Cashmeres The Good Wool Hunters The street-sleeping drifter Who is being transported back To his full belly past A cardboard of hand-scrawled commandments appears: A hastily written message from God Who has left explicit instructions as to how to lead a better, more purposeful