THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

When the assassin’s bullet of  rejection Hits your heart  All the birds Of your enchanted forest  Are suddenly stilled  And Grounded by grief  Because only those with wings Truly understand The risks of flight. After a moment of silence They assemble Like memorializing Wallendas Along a high-wire branch And sing a healing song from The plume of their chests In honor of you, Their fallen comrade. And then  After applying  the ceremonial beak-full of mercurochrome  And a kiss  straight from the nest  To the scraped knees of your ego They take to the skies In perfect  formation Because They still have worlds to conquer And love to search for And poetry to finish. Just like you.

I am six And I am gone And all I can leave behind. Are my words And the echo trails of songs That I sang In church with grandma, On my favorite swing, That used to guide  the tips my shoes to the sky, Or in my room where  I always danced To grown up songs That I knew were about love. I am six And I am gone. And I take with me the only shadow That I have never known Which will never grow Into the image of a man. I am six And I am gone And I will never ride the Sky Trail Monorail At Gilroy Gardens Again Or Bugly the Goldfish Or the duck shaped paddle boats Which I used to stand up on And yell Look at me, mommy! Look at me! While my mom and dad Would beam back Like a pair of lighthouses Who would never let me become Lost at sea. I am six  And I am gone. And I will never go to Christmas Hill Park again Where I used to ride my bike to the moon And kick goals And have picnics...

I speak to my mom every day. When we   connect, the fragrance of memory arrives  like prairie storm clouds filled with impending  sauces, dabs of Chanel, and finger-painted lotions which were applied to the taut skin canvas of pale white legs and shy ankles. And there are sounds which are light years away the rapture of records the duet of parakeets the side show of television the unbreakable code of Yiddish. Just a word or two  and I am back in our tiny apartment castle where the Queen wore a thorny crown of rollers and the armor of a girdle while the King pulled his dreams like a plow horse in the field of the family. We talk my mom and I covering the vast territory  of nothing and  everything I ask her about dad, how he’s doing because I know that he’s listening from  behind the citadel of  a snap-open newspaper where he spent most of his life hiding behind the headlines. And in the end,  ...

Despite their official status Ghosts do not retire Or sign up for Medicare They are alive and well  The bigger than life ones  Live with vivacity in the  transmission of streams On the twirling carousel of turntables In the cemeteries of novels And in the silver screen infinity of movies  Where at this very moment Jean Harlow is Slinking like a panther in A dangerous negligee And Jimmy Stewart is stammering his Way into the heart Of a woman who has Pulverized his bashful vocabulary. The city ones still drive trolly cars And horse-drawn lunch wagons And dunk doughnuts in Chock Full of Nuts And sell the Herald Tribune for a nickel on  Street corners And sip in speakeasies  And row barefoot in Central Park  With parasols and straw hats While legendary performances Are still being given beneath the ornate chandeliers of Theater palaces. The ones who are closest to me, The once upon a ti...

Maybe we feel more alone Because we are always On the receiving end of Things Like data  And Signals And boxes that have traveled the length of  The Amazon Directly to the gimme Grabby hands of our front door Which we greet With the felicity of rose petals and the passion Of a Times Square sailor Kissing the war goodbye On the surrendered lips of a limp-bodied  Arm-dangling nurse. And yet at the end of the day When my only companion is The invisible escort of The well-traveled sleeping pill The truth is Right outside my shutters The overpopulation of stars cram the roadway of The universe Like all the abandoned cars  bound for Woodstock When we were young Oh, when we were young, We prowled And excavated And gathered And chanted the ancient mystical Incantations  of rock and roll As we migrated our way Across the chart of evolution That ended  Once we finally stood st...

THE RING-A-DING-SOLUTION Written By David Steven Simon When I am suddenly caught In the  swirling  inlet  riptide Of stress Rather than drown By holding my own face down, I turn to my invisible friends  of record Like Capitol Years Frank, To sing  Frank The interpreter of maladies And melodies Was the tough-guy  Priest of the Church of Me Too Who preached from the cathedral of barrooms In a tribal plume of Camel smoke “This is a gentleman’s drink,” Sinatra once said referring to His signature cocktail which was  a mix of four ice cubes, two fingers of Jack Daniel’s  and a splash of water. He would never touch the rim of a glass  but rather cupped it in his hand with a cocktail napkin Like a dame. And then he would proceed to thinly slice the gabagool  of his wrists  With the jagged blade edge of rejection Like the times that he Tried to commit suici...