New York Blog 4: Hollywood

Stars on the ground all around

Up the boulevard

On the hill, looking down, white

totemic characters stand in the breeze

well beyond a real estate wheeze,

where land, parcelled in neat quadrants

Has places for souvenirs, sheen, and smoking:

The next commercial tingle

Everywhere the street reeks

of dysfunctional dreams

with souls transformed and spider men

weaving their trade of postures

Tourists snap, the young, tarted up,

congregate in claustrophobic holes seeking

the next fuck the next trip

the next nonchalantly discarded two wheeler

lying on the sidewalk

Sometimes falling, constellations afar,

In tents or sprawled

unconscious on concrete

alongside handprints of now and ancestors

blurring in a fabricated merry-go-round

With personality tests and macabre museums

Celebrating lives lighting a silver screen

Offering a quick solution a buzz

a life direction

Alongside holes dispensing black liquid

Regurgitating plastic galore, stuffed into trash

And a gong of superiority simpers and

Angels are a long way off

How would those long departed

From the undulating hills

View the bittersweet steamroller progress?

Like imagined, brilliant washing

Put out to dry, tumbling,

Wafting always just out of reach