Wait your turn to piping tune
Suncreen, scrunchie, ***** pack

Un-birthday song by Hatter, mad
Wrought iron, mushrooms, storybook

Take the fastest spinning cup
Play-dough, crayons, apple sauce

Bring your playmate. Tag, you're it
Purple, maelstrom, pizza dough

Spin the sun and time away
Mushrooms, sunscreen, apple sauce

Ninety seconds: laughter, puke
Manners, madness, misery

Night falls under sleeping tree
Paper lantern, lightning bug

Hand-in-hand, stumble home
Twilight, popcorn, cinnamon

You've been drunk in drunken tea
Swing the gate,
Hurry on

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.

You pass the flume. You pass the time.
Waiting in line, Reading signs by flickering light
Cozy and vaguely threatening
You may get wet!
A clatter, screams,
a flash out of the corner of your eye
like southern lightning (with no big thunder) down into the bottomless abyss.

Based on a movie (not available in the gift shop)-- a retelling by whites
of a story written down by whites
told by black
slaves born South

You're a brare, like Rabbit
Prey to Brare Fox
Under the darkness you pass under dim lights that take you back to a time that was, but never way,
Logs that were never trees
Moving through the canal like a slave, sluicing through the swirling sluice
Prettygoodsureasyerborn Prettygoodsureasyerborn

No interaction here in the dark outside-inside
Nobody borne dry, bone dry, unbloodied
By water or unclaimed by the canal full of logs which were never trees
Moving like a slave on display for white birds who, smiling blinking singing, extend
their white wings to show you off to their cartoon friends—a conversation
which you can never be in on
though they look at you.

And then you dip into dark and doom
Quivering rabbit children cower
--clatter, flash, scream--
You begin to suspect your time is coming
And your log, now defying gravity, leaves you without doubt

So, you're trying to find your lauighin place. If only you could. We've
got your laughin place right here.

The mouth opens wide for you
A mouth with briar teeth
A flash like southern lightning
And big thunder fills your ears

Zippadee-do-dah, Zippadee-ay
Your pain will stick to you like wet clothes as you float, swim in the clear swirls
and back into the dark where there's light and singing alligators.
Zippadee-do-dah, Zippadee-ay
They look at you with mechanically blinking eyes
that cannot see you, another guest—another stand-in
for Braer Rabbit, a character who looks nothing like you but who sings
for you and speaks for you.
Zippadee-do-dah, Zippadee-ay
His voice is high and cloying with a Huck Finn twang and a Shirley Temple cry.
He's relaxing at home and you are wet and he is warm in home's golden light.
Yet he speaks for you, sings for you, but he does not see you.
A cast member made of person who has no lines to speak will pull you from your log.
You will laugh as puddles form at your feet and as you find your
photo—your moment of unbridled, child's
horror now passed, past

You'll pass the flume on your way home—clatter, flash, scream--
You're dripping, drying, the salt of the day now washed away
But there's brine in your sensible shoes, squishing between your insensible toes
And making your feet heavy as you leave.
Braer Rabbit is home and cares not for your troubles.
Zippadee-do-dah, Zippadee-Ay
Magic words, shrill, laughing tragic words
You will remember when you look at your souvenir photo
And smile.

To all who come to
                                                                                  this happy placenta, welcome.

Disneyland is your lane.

Here, agency relives fond menageries

                                                                                  of the pastiche,

                                                                                  and here yo-yos may savor

the chamber and promoter

of the fuzz.

Disneyland is dedicated to the identification,

                        the dregs,

                         and the hard factors

that have created America... with hope that it will be a source of jubilation

                                                                   and installment

to all the wormhole.

Man and mouse holding hands, beholding

what they have done together.
A magic Marcelline, MO:

a portal to lands that beckon, but never compel.
Trees, silent water, castle walls dividing

off magic gardens and sacred
spaces.Tiki torches leading in

to a real rainforest with fake animals,
fedora'd adventurers and no dust

or hunger or poison. A whilring, infernal
rocket sprung from the mind

of Jules Verne, raisng your hopes that
one day you'll own that jetpack,

flying car, ticket to the moon.
A fairytale castle, draw-bridge down—

a glittering carousel inviting from behind forbidding walls.
A fort with wide open doors that fear only animatronic

Indians and where every frontiersman is a hero to be
emulated by your children.

You need not choose right away.
No need to be hasty. If you wish, you may

choose to stay here, to linger, the aroma of the popcorn
cart competing with the fragrance

of the popcorn blossoms on the sheltering trees
and the flowerbeds decorating, protecting

Walt's silent, inanimate memorial,
until the stars come out and

the crickets chirp in the voice of a
conscience content, and popcorn

lights form haunting outlines, constellations
telling whispered stories and seductively

suggesting that tomorrow you stand
in line for a new ride: falling in

love, signing the papers, applying
for that loan, giving it just

one more chance. Here, you cannot
sleep, but you will dream.

And rest in the heart, in the womb.

I saw you across a great distance
(Thirty or forty feet away) a long time ago
on a paved lot, enclosed by trees
And I saw you, a girl--
A space princess in metal bikini,
Riding a tricycle with lost boys
In furious BigWheel circles
(And pardon me if I'm selfish for saying)
But I imagined that I was the only one of the
Lost
Boys who saw what I saw.

We were safe, enclosed
By oaks, maple, rhodedendron,
In a galactic garden
Of outragous child delights

We embraced before you left
But never understood touch--
Never guessed at the
Seeds: cells
All asleep in our little selves

The day you left the old neighborhood
You turned to me and waved, smiling
And vanished beyond the trees
And became more powerful than I
Could possibly imagine.

Try as my mother may
No explanation could dry my skinned-knee tears
Or draw you back from the invisible force
That brought you to me
Then took you away
In the morning

A long time ago in a paved lot
Enclosed by trees
Far, far, and very near . . .

You'll find yourself here,
not sure how you arrived.
But you won't question it.

The mayor is home: his apartment in the fire house.
His lamp is lit, and he is here to welcome you
Though you cannot see him
But you do not question it.

And you'll hear bells and the clopping of hooves ahead
of an old-style streetcar in the age
of the internal combustion engine,
infernal, before the world could burn.

But you won't question it,
No, it's all perfectly natural
As though you grew up here

And here you do grow up as you walk the street,
The buildings pressing ever closer together, merging
And you somehow grow taller.

As a fairytale castle looms ahead of you
As though it were in the sky.
It's color is a pink that
smells of cotton candy
and popcorn
and perhaps, a hotdog

It passes out of your view
Like a mirage or a whiff of cloud
As you smell the food
The advertising of smells
Seducing you away

You stop, and you look
And you don't see the tourists in shorts
And tennis-shoes, dressed ******-chic for an expensive vacation
Or smell their sunscreen or see any sign
Any sign of change since that time, no
No, you don't see anything
Which you don't wish to see

You don't see a police station
Or cigarette butts on the pavement
Or a war memorial
Or a boarded-up building, closed.
All have been scooped up
Swept up, kept up by
white-uniformed sanitation officers
with little bow ties, discretely
cleaning up the world

But you will scarcely miss these things, nor
notice their absence and
You will not question it.

For this street is a wish,
A longing,
A child's prayers
Answered

For this is a place where no person,
No thing is old, but all is new
and useful and present:
As immediate as the trail of ice cream
making its osmotic way along
the edge of your sugar cone in the sun
And down to your sticky fingers.

The castle is there, you see now, but it's so
very far away.
There is no rush.

Step inside a shop—take your pick--and you will find
plush carpets, cooled rooms, parkay tile

Above the souvenirs and tchotchkes you will
Notice heart-stopping detail
In a light fixture
In a cherry wood crown molding
In Tiffany glass and marble counter-tops
Exquisite agony of
nostalgia for the half-remembered

And you're puzzled because you can't buy, here,
An old-fashioned ice-cream soda
With which your great-greats wooed each other
And fed each other, never considering, even
conceiving scandalous sensual jokes with whipped cream
And for this, today, you love them.

Your feet will amble you back and back again on themselves,
turned around (in spite of unmistakeable
castle-mountain-rocketship landmarks.)

There, Just behind these buildings, you're certain, there
should be a baseball diamond, alight with the noise
of boys playing with a stick and a ball

There, a neat row of stately, sabbatical victorians

There, a haphazard school yard with a tire swing
and a red schoolhouse, reliable as a sunrise
keeping protective watch behind it.

And you forget
racism
You forget
any war
You forget
your own
many sins
Like
vanished
cigarette
butts

And you smile, giving the uniformed man
peddling mouse-shaped balloons
a little more of your money
than he is asking for