The Hollywood I knew is a kingdom of lights inside
frosted glass, nestled in time and fashion

between the Pantheon and the World Trade Center;
Beautiful and ******. Mine, a slouching, wrinkled

hung-over pilgrimage. Consider this tale: Awakened as a young man
by the work of a master, I wrote a very fine novel—a pretty

bit of gibberish which I fancied to be as magic as Keats.
But criticism is as inevitable as breathing

Or drinking.
I know what it means to want

to escape these things. Pretty sparks danced on Hollywood Boulevard,
blonde little fairies whose clothes burned right off

to countless hours of music.
One drew near me—whispered in my ear:

“We want more plagiarism,” she said.
And I wrote scripts, turning hack,

back, and a thought floating, repeating
endlessly martyred—personality spent

I know what it means
To want to escape these things

So I drank
A little more

Just a little and in the other room we had a scene
And she burned me between the legs.

And so, a cultivated man of middle-age, and in harmony
With the best English style of the early Victorian period,

I expired.

endlessly martyred—personality spent
I know what it means to escape these things.
To go to the pictures on warm evenings in June
is to want to escape.

In the mushroom-growing darkness,
Sweet and silent--in its own way--

Everything presents itself as familiar.