THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

The men at Club Q were slaughtered like fresh meat because they were doing the very same thing that toddlers do. They were playing dress up.   In their own private playground.   They were all young people with futures as colorful as their beloved flag. The word they used to define themselves was gay which used to mean lighthearted and carefree. Now it means targets for brutal murder. Do not forget for a second that all of them were someone's babies whose through-the-years highlight photos are arranged on walls, lined up strategically on top of pianos, and stuck to refrigerator doors with colorful magnets which, at the speed of madness, have all become standing memorials to men who preferred mascara to massacres. Last night in a Virginia Walmart Supercenter a shooter assassinated six people in a break room and wounded four others. Gone this time are mommies and daddies, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters whose empty chairs at the Thanksgivi...

She floats  on a mattress protected by the parent arms of side rails to the sedated fugue  of murmurs and machines along the fluorescent horizon of a   hospital room which was once upon a time a fairy pink crib with billowing sails that skimmed along the surface of a wind-blown, sunlit nursery bound for all the birthright adventures to come which are now as lost as comet trails The distant traffic is conducted by  the highway sway of palm trees Everyone is going somewhere. But not her. Not her. She is old now But young when her eyes are closed. which sends her back to the time when she would lie like a ball of house cat beneath the curved rear window of the Hudson Hornet watching the tapestry of infinity swirl by while daddy Captain of the wheel puffed on a Bering Plaza like he was blowing kisses, the ponton body of the car rocked her baby brother like a cradle and mommy   misted with Arpege   sang Catch A Falling Star and Put It in Your Pocket for that nig...

Think of the sun as the warmth you are aching for when everything feels like  the ruins of the rain Think of the moon as the maestro  of the  tides conducting the rise and fall  of your shipwrecked heart Think of the stars as the Knights Templar of infinite possibilities  ready to ride into battle to defeat your doubts and uncertainty  Think of the air as the replenishment of memories Think of the passing clouds as a cargo full of dreams Think of the winter storms as a flurry of dispatches  handwritten in the script of snow angels which in any language reads I understand. And think of tomorrow For what it always is: A ready to be delivered  tenderly whispered answered prayer.    

  I am in this old house That’s me  framed in the window Still a boy Dreamy as a Gainsborough Watching the seasons swirl by Like Isadora on the wind Standing beneath the sloping weight of a sad-eyed eave The house  which was once rather imperious Especially when it cackled at squalls Or dismissed the night Like it was a silly schoolgirl is bony and hollow-cheeked now  fragile as a final breath haunted by ghosts insulated by regrets  But I haven’t aged I never will. I will always be right there In the window To the very end Me: The mad inventor of memories to come Who can still hear  The mischief of cartoons The exhale of an exhausted shampoo bottle And the insistence of radio static which disappeared the moment that the dial discovered Frank Sinatra   Clear as a bell singing  The Nearness Of You Which coaxed my mom to turn away from the sink and nuzzle her nose into the fidelity of my dad’s soft shoulder And ...

Summer left as it always does Without leaving a note It simply snuck out of the house one night Being careful not to let the screen door slam Disappearing like a lover who knew That this could not last forever. And just like that gone is The tiptoeing sea The sunbaked shoulders The breeze swaying hammock The flung-open windows The moony kiss The night-lit carousel The giggles of dusk That travel like fireflies until everyone is safe and accounted for. And now  I am staring at this October afternoon The sky Is Joni Mitchell Blue The clouds escalator by Losing strands of cotton white hair A concession to age Later, the sky will turn as black as an ancient 78 playing the ghost chords  Of a long-vanished pianist a Schubert impromptu, perhaps Whose every note Like the snowflakes to come is an opportunity to quietly fly

My life is a  contract An allegiance to the present Which everyone belongs to Like a church Or a Planet Fitness membership. Every day I clock in By opening my eyes And then I  go through the  motions of the morning as if I am here as attentive as a caretaker when most of the time I’m  Secretly A hobo  Riding the rails Weaving through The clouds That I would love to slip into Like a puffer jacket If it would Just open its arms. I would linger longer in the now If I could But lately it has been too punishing And moving way too fast As if the guy in charge of  The carousel Is hammered And off somewhere Having himself A smoke While we all spin out of control Flying in all directions off horses And elephants. So I choose to leave As often as possible. By listening to  music from a time when Presidents were glamorous And feet were bare And bottoms were belled And hair had no limit Flowers were currency Aging was unimaginable And forever Was the only imaginab...

I have become the shepherd of remembrance  The caretaker of dreams The defender of sorrow And the traveling companion of faith who  despite the frost acts like the Night Blooming Jasmine  that reflects their light back to to a sad-eyed moon. And I am the guardian of experiences where the ghosts of anyone who has ever said, “I love you,” like my mom and dad Or left me  The way she did live on to remind me that moments of happiness can only be caught like butterflies  in snapshots  which never reveal what happened seconds later.

This can’t possibly be my hand. My hand is the tiny one That tried to weave the infinity of moonlight Into something tangible from the launching pad of a white wicker cradle My hand is the toddler one That was suffocated 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 finger painted like Pollock 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 penis trembled and throbbed Like the front row of an Elvis concert. My hand is the young man’s one Which was made of young man’s dreams and a young man's blues My hand is the...

My mom is mist now Like the wrist spray of Arpege That used to follow her Like me In the pony gallop of sock trails Wherever she went. My mom is longing now A distant moon 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 guiding young lovers Wherever they are Bone-skinny Frank in the wee hours  Fred and Eleanor as they begin the Beguine My mom is the song that arrives At the port of night When I turn and try to  Hold the empty sea. My mom is in the clink of china cups now. In the messages scrawled in the secret code of cake crumbs In the murmur of a soap opera In the whistle of a kettle  On the filter tip of a lip-stained cigarette In the final resting place of an ashtray. 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 after her mom died. She stood at the window crying And then turned to me and said in a ...

  The stranded babies of Kyiv the nameless unclaimed product of surrogates swaddled in elephants and flowers crowned by a spray of bonnets sleep in the pink, pre-dawn age of dreams in charitably arranged cribs numbered 1-19 protected by a soft brigade of nannies armed with bottles and laps in a basement decorated in war dust while in the terror of the grim out there intended targets that used to be people weep  and drag their belongings like portable oxygen tanks across a heartbroken bridge as buildings and bloodlines are vaporized and become as forgotten as the stranded babies of Kyiv whose bridge to their faraway tomorrow is heartbroken too

Rain in the city My windows Look like Those paintings by Hassam That float on the walls of the Met Like kites stilled by   The mother arms of beach wind Streetlight splatters Like Pollack paint Umbrellas twirl Like parasols in the hands of Madame Monet Men sprint As thunder rumbles Like Hannibal’s elephants And Ubers fly through puddles Like toddlers dressed like Superman. A tribe gathers Like a mini Woodstock Beneath the awning Of the age of Aquarius A Starbucks window becomes An exhibit of latte and second thoughts Pizzas are divided And conquered Neon openly weeps And a traffic signal Sends out beams of light To all those lost at sea. While at the very same moment The notes of Debussy heal someone’s heart Skin flushes from a just arrived orgasm An apology is delivered just in the nick of time While someone dances alone on a rooftop And Times Square sits like a lunar landscape Waiting to be found.

For a year now (Perhaps it’s more. It’s hard to say now that time and promises are no longer a sustainable thing) my still tender boy heart has been attacked by the the Pamplona stampede of news stories punishing bills the taunting of age  the ongoing quarrel with darkness the plaintive wail of solitude the forever lost days The drinking The binging  and the longing for a time  which is any time but now.  Add to that  my phone which I stare at endlessly like it’s my prom date  the minute that her lace gown and corsage landed at her ankles on the floor of a Hyatt And that’s when the Jenga blocks collapse. And down the rabbit hole  I  go just like  Alice Until tarts and tea parties and puddles of tears float me back to the top where once again I dream the dreams Of the Mad Hatter.

I have not spoken to my dad in over forty years. Years ago I turned my back on him and walked away and that was that. No, we didn’t have a fight. He died when I was 25 and that walk away came right on the beat at the conclusion of the service in the cemetery after we lowered him with sway and love deep into the womb of the ground, like a treasure chest, ceremonially buried in that family secret place that only we would ever know the location of. When you bury a parent, time suddenly becomes unfathomable, unreliable, it suddenly faints away like a delicate socialite into the landing strip of a waiting divan, from the searing heat of loss, Our parent’s final breath pushes us into a dimension of exquisite separation and inextinguishable pain, where everything still feels just within our reach but in truth is now as far away as the weeping moon. The cemetery only knows formality. The weathered stones, which, like the canvas of our souls, have epitaphs and life stories carved deeply into th...