THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

I’ve lost a few things along the way. I’ve lost the sound of my dad laughing at Crazy Guggenheim from the hug of his soft putty chair which come summer wore a tropical skirt while a floor fan hummed like a monastery, a train tumbled by like the nighttime surf, and Adolph the neighborhood love struck shepherd howled at the moon, as fireflies danced like  the Bolsheviks at Petrograd. I’ve lost the scent of my mom who rehearsed her mournful daydreams as she misted herself with atomizers that sat like royalty on the court of her bedroom tray in the heart of Queens while the shiny knights of lipsticks protected the round table. I’ve lost the grumbling of my sister whose hormones attacked her like Kamikazes that left her floating in a harbor of teenage debris. I’ve lost the throttled silence of my grandmother whose sanity had long ago left the yard with the crack of the tragedy bat that exiled her to the bleachers of the invisible mothers who had lost their children too who were left to ...

My heart is   swaddled in the nursery of my chest swinging on a breakable bough frightened of the cradle and all fall until it’s comforted by the cavalry of memories like the ghost image snapshots of my long losts who adore me to this day through the code of their scrapbook eyes. My heart is a teenager still drunk on the  Absinthe of perfume or the memory of  long girl hair swaying like a hammock on the summer porch  of her naked lower back My heart is a bridegroom walking the last mile condemned by commitment  who is suddenly pardoned by the entrance of  my barefoot Titania in Queen Anne’s lace, attended by her bridesmaids, Cobweb and Moth, who have come to make tender folly of my fears and whisper their fairy songs of love which sounds like the lullaby tide of a never-ending beach. My heart is a father whose knees still quiver whenever it hears the word,  “Daddy.” And now it’s a grandpa moved to its core  by the stampede of feet and the cad...

They all return, The treasured ones. Sometimes it’s my sister the way my voice becomes her’s my vocabulary possessed  by a single ghost word It’s her. Not me. It’s her. Sometimes it’s my dad when I laugh in the after hours and silence becomes a billowing parachute. It’s his enchantment that tucks me in. It’s him. Sometimes it’s my mom in the mirror It’s her nose. Greek. Her eyes  a duet of iris sorrow that no one ever heard but me. It’s her. Sometimes it’s my dog When I walk myself along the shore Imagined paw prints unfolding She hears my whistle. She looks back. It’s her. Sometimes it’s my fallen friend Who makes cameos in my dreams that feel as real as the grief-stricken moon or the just stilled heartbeat which only moments ago pulsed like my hand me down watch that I depended on and thought would last forever.

My past lives in-between the sprockets of 8 millimeter memories whose color long ago drained from its face like mine did when five-year-old me stood in terror at the toe-gripped danger edge of the miles high diving board at the pool of our beach club, my teeth clattering like Lucero Tena's castanets. My mind is a projector now. that exhales the fragrance of slow roasting celluloid fresh baked Bakelite and simmering lubricants like the ones that flapped like baseball cards in whirling bike spokes in the back of classrooms and family dens, which unspools scenes of my heavily documented childhood where I shepherded traumas like lost sheep and was forced by expectation to embrace any gift or event with the gratitude of a third world child who had just caught a box of powdered milk tossed from a Red Cross truck, that approached dangerous levels of delirium, not unlike, I suppose, the performances of the housewives of the 50’s who, on the darkened stages of late night bedrooms, faked ecs...