THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

  They were friends at that point shoot the shit confidantes hoisting ale shots at McSorley’s as rain splattered the windows like Pollack paint  and sawdust added extra pulp  to their fiction when she asked him  kind of casual, kind of not why ghosts keep showing up in his poetry like the milky incandescence of long dead relatives, evaporated friends, and femme fatales who lowered the standards of his heart to this  very moment He gave it a thought a seconds long inventory at best and answered: I don’t know, what do you think? She looked at him like she just solved a whodunnit and said I think it’s about hope which stole his breath like a Times Square pickpocket and moved him to tears like  the first time he heard Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien.” which guaranteed him safe passage right there in a saloon packed with diehards    and tourists to enter his writing place where he could confer directly with the spirits themselves who told him that ...

Despite their official status ghosts do not retire or sign up for Medicare. The bigger than life ones  live with vivacity  in the cemeteries of novels and the tombs of movie palaces 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 ride trolley cars dunk sinkers in cups of Automat joe and hawk The Sun on  bustling corners. Those closest to me,  the conga line of relatives  who were picked off one by one by not so Lucky cigarettes, the sandlot boys  with their swat and swagger  the bikini girls who lost their tops to a bottomless sea and after dark became women  in fan cooled bedrooms Lit by mason jars full of fireflies are all still here like lightly dozing rose petals  in keylocked diaries. As for the ghosts who continue to populate the civilization of my nightmares...

                       Time is the quotidian commute of the sun   The months long striptease of the moon The  hammock sway of indecision The memorandum of embers that refuse to die. Time is the only thing that we can’t get enough of when we’re in love and it’s  the one thing that we cannot bear when our beds are haunted  and we’ve calculated  the number of  sparrows flying across the  vinyl coated  landscape  of quiet  wallpaper. Time  as we  age  becomes the conservator of our desecrated hearts whose still life memories  in the hummingbird second of say, a Sinatra song can exhume our grief or resurrect a  moment of lust like the summer of 1970 when the doe-eyed girl with late August skin answered the door wearing nothing but a powder blue barely snapped  work shirt and a nonchalant  towel  turban and smiled  like a daylily in the sun...

I arrive at this age  gray as an   Amagansett beach  late December sky peering through the loupe of a crinkly eye  which allows me to  magnify my flaws and appraise my life. While the pinky-ringed experts of The Antiques Roadshow would say that at auction  I wouldn’t fetch much the truth is that no longer matters because I have become  a family heirloom  like the flint glass replicas that Parisian high society once coveted as did our daughters  when they loved to play dress up in nana’s night-out fascinator uncertain heels and  mahogany velvet gown that was topped off  by the extravagant flourish of her Victorian Amethyst Paste Rivière necklace  with its Cadbury purple hue which, now,  all these years later,  lie in the tomb of a pale yellow dowry box on a runner of rose-embroidered lace  alongside the remains of a Silver Paste bird brooch and a pair of Art Deco earrings which soon enough will be us, sleeping dia...

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.    

 LOSS Written By David Steven Simon 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 which covers every name that are etched in stone.

I suppose I can succumb to defeat like a gazelle on the Serengeti and allow my fears to sink their razor-sharp teeth into the nape of my neck as I lie there motionless  and wait to slowly die just like my country is about to. I suppose I can watch my joy sail away like the incinerating corpse of a Viking pyre I suppose I can release my faith And cut off all contact to anyone who lives beyond the manifest heavens I suppose I can abandon all hope and wait for the floods to arrive I suppose I can erase my dreams and live with the torment of a blank canvas. I suppose I can divorce my soul and pretend that we’ve never met. I suppose we can cover our mirrors, recite the Kaddish and Howl like Ginsberg. hold an Irish wake perform a Buddhist sky burial march and lament  in a Jazz procession celebrate Dia de los Muertes and watch the ashes of our beloved dissolve in the wide open deep Or we can take a few days  to wobble back up onto our unsteady feet and shake off the deluge the s...

The last leaf rides the curlicue current wickedly defying gravity an unsupervised what the hell kid free at last as zig-zagging squirrels and merry prankster dogs  suddenly stop  and hold their breath like big top neck craners as the leaf refusing to pull the parachute cord dares to die like Kerouac  in his hellbound ‘49 Hudson. For the grand finale the leaf plummets tumbling and  somersaulting like Monk notes played in a seedy swan dive until    it makes touchdown landing  on the lunar surface of old friends who found  their final resting place amongst the reckless litter  and deadbeat acorns of this heaven on earth.