THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

On An Autumn Day Like This Written by  David Steven Simon On an autumn day like this when the leaves  shed their modesty and change like flirty high school girls in a doors wide open pastoral dressing room emerging as scarlet women only to retreat and return as bare anorexic  branches who think they look fat I sit  on this pine-slatted Central Park bench autographed by lovers  painted by pigeons and long for the days when everyone was still here until they began to disappear And I was left an orphan of this late November darkness waiting for the light to return which makes  what lies ahead as heartbreaking as goodbye and as fragile as forever 

  I’m on a 22-block  Fall escalator ride Moving with childhood velocity The sky is Tiffany blue Which makes everyone feel As prosperous as a happy ending My heart is that red balloon which floats over the Strand Bookstore kiosk with its novel-excavating archeologists As the Agnes de Mille of the wind   Shows it how to do the Red Maple Leaf rag As I am enveloped by the swarm of Columbuses discovering America The fanny pack of wolves The sneaker hoofed stampede The unicorn-fed girl in her multicolored finery The Mickey Mouse rat race The merry prankster dogs who prance like ponies as their wagtails keep time like metronomes The heads-down-flock,  pray to their phones Lourdes knows why As I am passed by The Pashminas The Good Wool Hunters The street-sleeping drifter Who is being transported back To his full belly past A cardboard of hand-scrawled commandments appears: A hastily written message from God Who has left explicit instructions as to how to lead a better, more ...