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...