THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

A January corpse lies face down   In a frozen stream of gutter soup abandoned like a thought forgotten like a dream a festive skirt tangled  in its limbs. Just hours ago  that cadaver was our family favorite the center of attention bigger than life  twinkling like the skyline is right now I remember when you first came home  Daddy carried you in like he was balancing a birthday cake  Or a hand grenade with a missing pin Mommy fed you  dressed you  and stared at you all night as she sat in the comfy chair near the fireplace  and serenaded you with happy songs as the snow  outside swirled like parade confetti gone mad. But it turned out that you were not easy to live with. You were too much work. You were in the way. You took up too much space You were a constant mess You were no longer wanted. You were no longer loved. So out you went,  unlike the way you came in. And then  we simply rearranged the furniture and got on with our ...

My heart contains the balance sheet of me which itemizes The tally of my triumphs The ledger of my losses The listicle of my loves The record of my rage  The registry of my regrets The dividends of my defiance The subtotal of my sadness At the end of yet another day where nothing seems to add up Just as I’m about to tumble into The daisy field of sleep A voice arrives  that belongs to my dad who offers a simple,  one-word message  from the faraway that tells me everything that I need to hear. He whispers, “Tomorrow.”

I think to the very end, despite the stratospheric heights that they ascended, Paul and John were little boys with  broken hearts desperately in search of the ghosts of their mothers.  At their peak as their maturity evolved at a lightening pace both visually and audibly, they knew how to wrap sadness in a shiny, melodic package. They  understood profound loss yet knew how to paint their masterpieces with brush strokes of melodic hope.  They were conjoined at the heart which is why they fought like spurned lovers. They were what Europe needed after being obliterated by the war and what America needed after the Kennedy assassination.  They initially seduced us with a handclapping fuel of joy and cheekiness.  How ironic that that learned their trade in of all places, Germany where there was a darkness at the edge of town.   We, who were there in the day, revered them because to us their music was a sermon at the  church of what's happening now. We w...

We forget most of the time that when we watch TV especially the news No one is looking  directly at us. No one is making direct eye contact. That is nothing more than an illusion. A parlor trick of electrical intimacy. All the newscasters see are bright white lights the kind that interrogators use to wear people down and a blinking red camera light  which navigates them towards the general direction of  wherever the beam of light  falls on you. To them, you are nothing more nothing less than the teeming masses yearning to be free to watch. The people who populate sitcoms are like the ghosts in evening clothes who cut 78s in the 1920s   when jazz flew like martini-soaked doves from the basement of Smokey Club Nowhere that somehow managed to touch your heart  90 years later. Sitcom characters are  the product of pure invention with a drizzle of whimsy who are no more real  than that man or woman  who turned and smiled at you at the traffic ligh...

The unmade bed is a still-life study of the final moments of last night a Wee Gee crime scene photo of muffled sheets throttled comforter and bumped-off pillows that lie slumped over  like Crazy Joe on a cold slab of Little Italy concrete minutes after the hit. Judging by the evidence there was a struggle the work of a professional nightmare. The weapon was memories a slow-acting poison that no human can survive that caused the victim to be visited  in the final moments  by the pageant of lost loves who arrived as they always do one by one just as eyelids closed like evening primrose which know how to protect themselves from the ravages of the night

It’s my first birthday since you left which feels like evaporated centuries now Even though you had plunged into the tar pit of sorrow You called me  from the area code of memory  trying hard to sound like sing-songy-you before your vocal cords became as withered as ancient parchment And pain became your metronome For a few spare seconds we were toddlers again daffy and defiant spinning in circles in party clothes driven by the kind of bliss that is the provenance of dogs and the courtship dance of flamingos as we celebrated with a fallen comrade slice of cake and a pyramid of presents  That had wiggly ribbons like  The ones in your hair. When you said goodbye It felt like a solemn ritual like we were signing an armistice that spelled out the conditions of your surrender I could not let it end like that.  So I imagined you On the deck of the Mauretania In clever tweeds, long gloves, and hat waving with merriment to me on the moors as I watched you disappear into...

My life has been   a series of dances The contortion of birth The late-night sway in a strong pair of arms The pram-escorted air kick Where rubbery feet  tapped along the cloud covered floor  of the passing sky The hurry, flurry 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 partners Whose dresses rustled like department store 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 ballet of the bending over backward The extraction of concessions The half-hearted apologies The turning away when you knew it was over And now all that is left  Is the calligraphy of remorse And the lone wolf howl of despair Un...

We may not speak in poetry But we feel in poetry Especially when  we make guest appearances in dreams featuring every age we’ve ever been. when we yearned for the love that we lost Or when we reach out For a fistful of pillow Or skim along a lake In an old wooden rowboat That forgot its wings Dressed in nothing more Than, the formality of cobwebs and an ancient morning jacket made of dew

It begins with the forecast of our disposition. Which we depend on Like the bedtime reading of Goodnight Moon. Then without warning the world betrays you like your friends did When they disappeared without explanation. Time reverses its course And you are suddenly hell-bent for the asylum of childhood. The Stargazer Lilies become unforgivable. Che gelida manina intolerable And your heart begins to suffocate Like Desdemona at the hands of the one who loved her most Despite your cries of anguish And the last-ditch effort of Hail Mary prayers It starts to rain bricks Like a biblical curse Which like the early stages of Jenga Seems manageable  until the Unforgiving decide to accelerate this  game of the Gods And entomb you beneath the stacks Like tomorrow When we will watch her fade away With no assurance from the moon As the snowflakes fall Like a flurry of epilogues And covers every name That is etched in stone.

The sky remembers her best. It has, after all,  observed her every moment  filing them away in the archive of the clouds making it as dependable as rain to tell her story. It remembers her crawl which she performed  in an upright, sitting position gliding on her tush like Sportin’ Life. It remembers the Betsy Wetsy doll that she doted on The blindfolded search to pin the tail on the birthday party donkey It remembers her banging on the drum skin of a frying pan with a wooden spoon  Through the grin of a wide-open winter window To greet the New Year The second that it arrived As Guy Lombardo’s orchestra played  A clarinet-tipsy Auld Lang Syne from the Waldorf Astoria on the Dumont TV. It remembers her lacquer black party shoes Which landed on the lunar surface Of Daddy’s shoes When he danced with her at weddings Like they had been partners for their entire life. It remembers the measles and the mumps.  The cake and coffee pilgrimage of Aunts and Uncles Who s...

  When I think of her she’s not the discarded old lady asterisk lying in the ICU swatting away nightmares like dive -bombing hornets as darts of Florida sunshine pierce through the body armor of shuttered metal blinds like a burst of machine gun fire in an old Cagney film. She’s my sister from the 1950s who looked like the girl on the label of the Fox’s U-Bet jar dressed like an Ideal doll in smoothed-down taffeta and buckled-up Mary Janes her hair tamed like a pony’s mane her eyes the size of silver dollar pancakes her profile a perfect hollow-cut silhouette her smile a silent dispatch sent to our father in the secret cryptography of daddy’s little girl heartbeats Whose syncopated beep...beep...beep sound like the mechanical ventilator that is trying to keep her from flying far, far away here in the ICU.

Grief does not creep up on you like a stealthy infant  on the wings of palms and knees  It comes at you like  a sudden attack on the serengeti or a full blast hose on a peaceful protest which exiles you to the dreamscape of The Great Somewhere Else Where light cannot breathe Music cannot see And fear spreads like weeds In a flower bed that can no longer recall  The hospitality of the wind  Until perhaps in a year  or so once the final step has been taken  You emerge with older eyes  And a chrysalis heart Whose wounds  have grown membranes as fine as fairy wings which will tear however briefly whenever we feel the presence  of the lost who are as impossible to hold as a butterfly.