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 Christmas 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 lives. And now there you lie, breathless, disfigured and

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 were reborn because of them and the

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 light  right before  they drove off into the way

It’s always there Sadness Waiting In the psalm of morning In the bustle of the afternoon In the cerulean serenity of evening Like the soldiers In the trenches of Somme Eavesdropping on no man’s land Gripping their rifles Like nursery blankets Silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer. It lives beneath the speckled earth In the rumble of dreams The prelude of rain The epitaph of a teenage kiss The epilogue of regret In the songs that turn your heart Into mortar and pestle dust. And it’s engraved in the faces of the forgotten Who live in the exile of pictures Behind the longhand of fragile boxes That was written in the calligraphy of my mom Who knew As a tortured child That she had to warn me Of what lay ahead. Like Comment Share

 The Unmade Bed Written By David Steven Simon 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. According to experts Its lethal ingredient was sorrow That caused the victim To be visited by the pageant of lost loves who arrived as they always do one by one Just as eyelids close like evening primrose which know how to protect themselves from the ravages of the night

Summer Day one 1955 Setting: a small two-bedroom flat in a garden apartment building in Queens surrounded by a pasture of concrete. goldfish do their pond laps like old men at the Y trains a block away stop load  and deposit silent movie robot men with hats on the hour The German shepherd on the corner yelps his marching orders like a commandant I’m small wearing flappy shorts bare-chested blonde nimbly balancing on  an invisible highwire a teeny Wallenda  in socks as the Platters sing “Only You” on the Dumont  television set The parakeets Pepi and Gigi flutter and twirl like they’re on American Bandstand Sunlight sneaks in like a cheating husband striking the framed painted portraits of my sister and I like a Hollywood Klieg light My mom enters  solemnly  for the changing of the living room upholstery guard smelling like instant Maxwell a top note of aldehydes and bergamot and a just vanquished Viceroy with a lipstick tattoo which has taken a Johnny Weissmuller swan dive into the pool

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 the mist Which we both

The living  experience loss but so do the recently dead  as they watch us grow smaller and smaller In the rearview mirror of their heaven-bound coffins feeling as forsaken as the sad-eyed man who, after dropping off his baby at the faraway college, had to pull off  the road to cry in the confessional booth of a Circle K bathroom as gas pumps rang like slot machines Sinatra sang What’ll I Do in a nearby jukebox an old soldier waltzed with an armful of air in the forgotten trenches of a VFW hall as that daddy heart emptied every memory that it could no longer hold onto the life-scarred mosaics of a just-mopped floor feeling no doubt like the departed who do not know any more than we do how to say goodbye.

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  Broadway tapped along the cloud covered floor  of the passing sky The hurry, flurry crawl Which was greeted by an avalanche of invisible roses The first step wobble The handheld promenades The flirtation with waves  The welcoming of snow 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 pranced in the wind There was so much more 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 remo

It is 7 a.m. in  Nashville. The last call song slingers have lassoed the moon and the cafe bluebirds have flown home to roost   as the sun  like the south  rises again on the town of Green Hill. She is a 9-year-old girl with sleep-tangled hair wearing critter slippers   and a unicorn bathrobe that has the power to  protect her as long as she has it on. In the misty visibility of a daydream she sees  the cute boy in the lunchroom and smiles as if he’s smiling back She suddenly remembers falling asleep on the  Halloween hayride  and feeling the presence of Jesus  She reenters the ethos of her bedroom  and stares at the shadow of the crochet heart  which dangles  as carefree as Sunday on her window She dresses quickly  in between shivers.   Leggings from Kohls.  Her birthday high tops.   A tee shirt that reads, “Do more of what makes your soul happy.” She considers switching her alliance from  pink to lavender Pretends that lip balm is lipstick and poses  like Miley in the mirror  as Mama

We may not speak in poetry But we feel in poetry Almost all the time Especially when we dream Where we make guest appearances At every age that we’ve ever been. Or when we yearn 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 infinity 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 swung their Saturday night Ent

  When I think of her she’s not the discarded old lady asterisk lying in the ICU swatting away nightmares like a   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.