THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

Despite appearances   Heaven may not be  the always present  consciousness that watches over us during  beach hours gray rain city days or any number of man follies like battlefields the electoral college and never being able to find a parking space at Cotsco on weekends. For me Heaven is our private inner movie studio where all that is lost or eternally feared is stored in film cans on strips of memory celluloid that we can call up whenever the wars of love  become too much to bear. Silent night pictures flutter by  on the silver screens of  daydreams and nightmares, that feature mostly tales of loss and temptation featuring a cast of  a thousand ghosts who haunt the shadow valley of our hearts until the wee small hours  when the lights come back on and the exit signs are clearly lit. In that still-life morning moment of want and limbo all that remains  is a carousel of  dissolving images  on shredded sprockets  which we ...

Before the phone I stared I stared at the night sky like stars were diamonds and my eyes were jeweler loupes I stared at the girl who made my heart twirl like a Duncan Imperial top I stared into the crystal ball of my wild gypsy daydreams I stared at the covers of books like they were models loping on the runway. I stared at the impending animation of sculptures and paintings I stared at birds flying in formations as if they all got the memo I stared at the brief life of hand held snowflakes I stared at the technicolor dream coats of autumn trees I stared at window displays and gave voices to mannequins I stared into the whirligig wake of my past I stared into the wild west of my future I stared at scrapbook pictures and wished I was in all of them I stared at album covers and pretended that the singers were the friends who knew me best. I stared at dogs and wished they knew my name I stared at parades that moved like never ending rivers I stared at my babysitters and whispered, “I lov...

  The Caretakers by David Steven Simon Children are the caretakers of stars that can’t remember how or when they fell. It may have been a Tuesday. It happened so fast. One minute they were defying gravity, basking in the womb of time— and then, before they could wail in unfathomable sorrow, they tumbled and flailed and landed on the beach, like the twisted ragdoll bodies of Normandy, until the Caretakers arrived, carrying them off in low-swaying buckets to their work station beneath a striped umbrella planted like an astronaut’s flag, lit by the surgical luminaire of the soon-to-be-forgotten moon, where the Caretakers began their tireless work on the resurrection of the Fallen. Points were readjusted. Spines realigned. Compasses rejiggered— guaranteeing no star would ever wander off alone again. The work ended at early bright, with a final kiss that triggered a thermonuclear reaction in even the coldest of heavenly bodies— whic...

    My mom was a  clever girl with a tortured soul which she wore like a winter coat buttoned  to the neck to keep out the marrow chilled wind  even on the 4th of July. Her life was  rearranged  by tragedy when on a post bubble bath Brooklyn night in 1931 instead of following instructions  to keep a big sister eye on her forever scurrying  baby brother the tow-haired Harry,  she succumbed to the  hypnotic pull of motherhood  and tended to her doll with its go-to-sleep eyes and double- ruffled ribbon-tied  organdy bonnet, as Baby Harry in an effort to kiss the cheek of the beckoning moon secretly made his way to the launching pad of the window seat pressed his lips against the mesh of the screen and fell to his concrete death  while Wayne King and His Orchestra  played Goodnight Sweetheart on the Philco Highboy From that moment on my mom believed that  the family had secretly convened and convicted her of mur...