THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

Today and most likely tomorrow I feel like Zelda Fitzgerald splayed in Absinthe defeat beneath a beach umbrella that looks like a just sprouted daisy planted like a moon flag in the lunar beach surface of the Riviera. In these times of sorrow when the earth  and my country  no longer feel welcoming or safe I board a waiting steampunk rocket ship, the kind that Jules Verne once imagined which sits on a launchpad at the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences… aimed at the infinity of quivering stars which between you and me, are secret way stations where everyone  we ache to hold waits for us to come home.  like our moms and dads… who once upon a time  stared through a night wintered window in the grief-stricken hours past midnight until they heard the symphonic jangle of our childhood keys and breathed because they loved us that much.

  In lieu of  my search  which has produced little more than nets of maybes and I suppose,  I find  as I get older that the spiritual part of me finds satisfaction and salvation in the  molecular miracles of everyday things. The vocal piorouetting   of “Because.” The  just arrived pizza box. The arc of a bleacher-bound baseball  The whirl of a waltz composed  by the rain The abracadabra arrival of  spring The jabber of a river The stampede of toddler feet The conspiracies of books The memory  of a sundae  with its slender necked spoons And the daydreams of her naked body that trusted me once to want it.

My legacy Will always be everything I looked forward to He said with a sideways glance and the infinite sonance of  a soaring sigh. Living in this age of eyes Doesn’t distort what I have always seen I can still touch What was always Just beyond my reach The cry of my heart Is the melancholy aria  Of the faraway gull Softened by the sun A sparkle in a telescope Until it lands In the secret place Beneath the fine plumage Of time and shadows Where it can rest its wings and dream Banish and plot And try to remember  The last time  it was  adored by the sky

She arrived barefoot Pulled by the Magnet of music Her shoes Abandoned Like glass slippers Her toddler orbiting her Celestial body Like a baby astronaut Around the hemisphere of her skirt She twirls Like  Gene Kelly’s umbrella In Singing in the Rain As she performs  the spontaneous, Arm swaying wild-child choreography of motherhood Leaving in her car The exhausted Happy Meal  The weaponized heart The inheritance of disappointments The provocation of bills The asterisks  The annotations The affirmations The endless excuses and The resistance to indisputable facts Which is why she is here On leave from the Crusades With its sanguinary battlefield  of computers And coworkers And a marriage  That has lost its romance Like the keys that she can never find

This   can ’ t   possibly  be  my   hand . My hand is the tiny one That tried to weave the infinity of moonlight from the launching pad of a white wicker  cradle My   hand  is the toddler one That was gripped by a grown-up’s bigger one As we darted across The vast, black tar prairie of Jamaica Avenue In the middle of a car stampede. My   hand  is the kindergarten one that  hand  cranked a toy ukulele as if I only had minutes to live Gave life to puppets Clicked Bic pens like they were mini castanets Twirled the TV channel knob like a safecracker And tried to pin the tail on the donkey who had suffered the tragic loss of his own My   hand  is the adolescent one That longed to touch the warm muffin breast  of a willing girl Who would dance with me In the shadows of a school dance As  my  middle school manhood trembled and  throbbed Like the front row of an Elvis concert. My   hand  is ...

A walk All aboard The huff and puff of slow  moving trainers Time is dozing like the sun waiting in the wing easing into its first développé, ready to perform its arabesque with its partner, the sky Perfume lingers in the air From the runway of long stemmed dream girls Wearied by winter The convalescence has begun Days are long But not as long as memory Where the reverie of sprinkler dancing The chamber music interplay of baseball And the chimes of Good Humor Are just as clear now As they were to My mom and dad when they shared  a front porch .  hammock Swaying to their fidelity Ice floating in tumblers Cigarettes resting in the ashtrays we made Nested in contentment last night’s fight overruled by love They clung to the moment, just like they hold us in their ghost arms to this very day.