“If you do not write or film”,
the director wonders,
”am I alive?”

“What limbo am I in
when the shooting stops?
When my camera no longer
holds the beautiful prism.”

His films stay the same,
only he changes,
exchanging the silver screen
for glistening tin foil
heated under with a match.

When his pain matches
the others, he prays.
When greater, he’s an atheist.

The films are his only company.
He lives with them and for them,
remembering the cinema of his youth
filled with the scents of ****
and jasmine and summer breezes;

remembering the cave
where he learned
to read the light,
understand its alphabet,
and eventually, vocabulary
with each discovered ray.

He smiles as the music track
of little angels being taught
by the local parish priest
to match his voice note
by note flickers in.

Parasites: they insinuate themselves
into your head, your heart, your art

They exist in the schizophrenic zone:
the lower right corner of your painting
looking for patterns that go to childhood,
the well rehearsed gestures that
allow them to take over,
plant the image in your agitated brain
that makes you doubt your love,
sign over your entire identity,
make you think that they can ****
with a scrape of peach fuzz,
until everything smells, feels,
tastes exactly the same-
a collision of **** and water
that knows money and not art
is the iron that smoothes
out all those creases.

The concrete jungle is the exam.
Their goal is to dominate it.

You enter through the black portal
searching for the thing you lost
in the right corner a long time ago-
the thing you call son or daughter-
tapping out SOS with your forehead
on the button on the wall
that connects with the light outside
until it reads SON to that distant brain.

Whether you **** someone or betray
your country doesn’t matter.
It is just the thing you keep
hidden  in the basement
that doesn’t know  
that all it needs to escape
is to walk up the stairs.

Dreaming Graceland or Zombie Land: Double Tap


When you think Elvis was a fraud,
a rip off the black man’s voice;

when you finally meet someone
who smells like candles
instead of gunpowder and whiskey;

who is comfortable with you
driving that pink Cadillac
all the way to Memphis;

who won’t
throw your pink stuff
to the side of the road;

who will kiss you
and hold your hand

until you arrive at Graceland
and try on those blue suede shoes
that actually fit;

let you gyrate your hips,
and for one moment,
feel like the King;

until you open your eyes
and really, really see
that you’re  in Zombieland.

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (A Movie Poem)

The absence of love
makes one a villain
in other’s hearts.

In the proposal
the weeping willow
sheds its leaves
to the sky,

while in the bowels below
the servants of the earth
forge war,

pull iron from earth
as it screams
to be reclaimed.

Above, silk napkins
unfold into laps
with a curt snap of wrists.

Into the depths
the princess falls,
into the opposite of heaven.

She opens her eyes
to the evil above her, around her,
near her, pouring out
like bearings onto sheets of gold.

“Maybe,” she thinks,
“we can exist
without fear of war?
Find a way together?”

This is no fairy tale,
but yet this
is precisely a fairy tale.

She dreams of her wedding
where all are invited
and all are expected.

She can see butterflies
swirl around her wedding gown,
her face reflected in a golden bowl,
the bloom of thousands
of attending fairies.

But yet, she is still falling,
full with the wisdom
that the spindle
curses everything it touches

and that her subjects are locusts
fated to swarm the earth
a thousand years
enduring the evil promised them,

until she burns herself out,
the last blood of the Phoenix,
destined from ashes to be transformed.

She always knew that Oz was a one-time voyage
lasting until the red shoes dancing on and on
cracks the golden road, wears it to dirt dreams,
her tired legs collapsing into poppies fields,
pills, her voice singing on and on in the fall
until hoarse, silent and invisible.
 
She sings because she’s a mom.
She sings because she loves her children.
She sings because she adores the gay affection
of the Tin Pan Alley clubs that pays her
with fifteen tens in a white envelope.
 
Oz, now means living faded dreams in a small car,
fostering your children with your big house ex,
crashing with your ascending star older daughter,
the one with your voice, the great movie star legs
and that spells her name with a bold, wonderful Z—
living enough in her party to feel the gold dust
as you rub elbows with the famous that confuse you/her.
 
You live on your repartee, your “difficultness”,
the hunger in your soul that craves to be fed.
So, across the pond you fly to be fed by those
who know you only as a flicker of revival,
who can accommodate you in studio style,
until the pills, drink, the failures resurface
and they shun you in gentle niceties and quips.
 
Judy you were meant to travel better roads.
The Walk of Fame is not the total of your successes
but the shame of repeating your failures
until you are undone, for every star nova’s as it fades.

The cold blows north and the city falls
into the cycles of a leafless world.
It feeds off the brick, licks the shoes,
tastes the cotton of jackets,
gnaws hands clutching the last warmth
of summer close to their heart,
cuddling its last embers,
huddling to the next soul
with faint fires when it goes out.

Dogs on the leash paw the air
delighting in distinguishing
the smells of life and death all around.
Autumn is their rooting season,
their time to sniff for the rat
hidden in the pre-collection trash,
to proudly drop the last migrating Warbler
wounded by the reflection of sun on glass,
at their masters feet in the remaining
scent of the Great Wolf Hunt.  

With each gust their master’s minds go south
to thoughts of changeless sunshine,
snowbirds migrating in caravans
to The Villages filled with plantation magnolias
scarred with the memories of rope swings
and before that, feet swaying in the dirt,
never mindful that it was the African eye
who first caught the non-reflective sun
and bleached skin, the first shudder of cold.

The taste of cold on fingers and faces
etches their tundra souls
and in the rubbing of hands,
the warm breath of air in palms,
they almost feel the sun again.
They sense something invigorating,
thrilling in feeling the right amount of cold,
the wind howling  in the cave of their hearts.

Our marriage is old enough to vote now
and on this our porcelain anniversary
I vote “Yes, I do,”  over and over again.

A score of fine filigree plates I will gift us,
two broken to match the fragile times,
the eighteen days past the towers fall
when we married amidst grief and joy.

Our Noritake sacraments survives the bombings
of a blasted world, the cracking, fractures,
the buffing of our mistakes to a translucent
perfection, all frozen details rimmed with gold.

Cancer is etched on the lip, but so
is cure, joy, longevity, beauty, respect,
and the watermark underneath, our keepsake
forever, irreplaceable love.