Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Silver Dreams

Tight blue, silver eyes drop

onto my shoulder

past the pavement unseen.

Thirst borne of wanting

for things long forgotten

burns in the afterglow

of peptic slow dances,

churns in the left behind

of feckless dull hatred.

Idiocy cracking wise

cuts smoldering through my doldrums

while backwash borne of benders past

weighs heavy on my breath.

I step out into tree lined landscaped

boxes owned by corporate corpses,

as I drop stoned out of daylight

into nightscapes caged in Walmart.

Walmart, the one true equalizer!

Walmart, home to the great unwashed!

Walmart, sanitary evil incarnate!

Walmart, from womb to tomb to drunken temperance.

Walmart, you make difficult misery effortless.

The cinematic black horizon

lightens onto morning

while silver blinded like minded

neophytes creep naked.

Bruised brown splotches layered

onto concrete pouring

into ragged potholes

consecrating my religion.

Suburban dreams melt to urban blight

as I walk toward a night draped sullen.

Walmart fades to steel and glass

lit cavalcades sky scraping,

a demographic born of gridlock

block after block after shocking,

as I step out into traffic

riddled yellow taxi madness,

insane asylums piled on top

of hallucinating lovely.

Gone, vanilla sadness.

Gone.

Monday, December 27, 2010

New Year

Existence is a tingle, an itch,

a silly, persistence cacophony.

Too often, life is but waiting for itself,

reeking of recursive regret,

the lonely eying 'if only' in jealous frozen fury.

*****

I'm standing mid December

on a breeze blown bitter Sunday,

contemplating New Year,

with a gimpy psyche broken.

*****

Sweet sweat of horror

creeps needles up my spine.

Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,

drifting snow cold through my mind.

*****

Sweet twist of sadness

falls forlorn down my back.

Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings,

as life shoots up the dropper's neck.

*****

Auld Lang Syne is everywhere muddled,

toward resolutions torn asunder,

as Chinese New Year looms to catch them,

a safety net through January

until the dragons dance.

*****

And after all the promises

melt into March,

she's still softly sour

but not bittersweet,

caught in a storm

of nerve ends dying

caught in that place twixt

self loathing and writhing

in the New Year.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Ally, Ally, All Come Free

I'm having a very surreal and oddly enjoyable time watching a Hallmark TV Movie staring Ally Sheedy and Meatloaf. It's a "drama," so they say: Citizen Jane.  No relation to Citizen Kane.

Meatloaf is god awful and brilliant in this. He's a detective on the trail of the person who murdered Ally's niece. At first, he's just painfully bad. But then something strange happens ... his performance grows on you (sort of like a fungus). A half hour into it, you're transfixed by the monotone delivery. The ssssllllloowww manner in which he walks and speaks and reacts.

And. Then. You're. Hooked.

This just might be the best performance by an 'actor' in the history of the art form. Still, through all that, it remains horrible. I can't explain the paradox. Then again, I could never explain the existence of Meatloaf period. Stop right there! Before you go any further ... He was wonderful in Fight Club as the Testicular Cancer Guy with Breasts, so there you have your precedence.  And in the Paradise video.  Can't forget Rocky Horror.  What about Roadie? Damn, the guy's a regular thespian.  Inside the Actor's Studio material for sure.

And Ally? She's the reason I rode this wave on a channel surfing Saturday night. You see, Ms. Sheedy rocked my world in the 1980s. Her one-two punch of Breakfast Club goth-chick and St. Elmo's Fire Alex/Kevin girlfriend had me reeling.

I identified with Andrew McCarthy's Kevin in St. Elmo's more than any movie character to that point in my young life: he was almost exactly my age, he was a (wannabe) writer, everyone thought he was gay because he didn't have any recent conquests, and he was secretly in love with Ally (well, with her character, but let's not quibble).

For me it started and ended with her eyes.  Then continued with her voice and her mannerisms. Her ... everything.

She knocked me for a loop all over again as John Candy's love in Only the Lonely in 1991. But there were danger signs ahead, I knew even then. Certain features you knew wouldn't stand the test of time. The softness was, just a touch, harder than in her brat packing days.  Pointy features pointing a bit more.

Fast forward eighteen years and not much has changed with my life. I might as well have been put into suspended animation, waiting for something to snap me out of it.

But I think our 'romance' is over.

The danger signs were justified. The years have not been kind to her, with a hard edge where only sweetness once lived. Now to be fair, it could be the shrew of a character she's playing here. And the years have not been kind to most of us as we drift into our late forties (they were never all that sweet to me to begin with).  But it's not her looks that have soured (it was never really her looks that got to me, so much as her aura, that glow).

Oh well, we'll always have Georgetown.  Here's looking at you, kid.


Still, the ravages of age have been more than kind to some.  My #1 top dog, big cheese Hollywood I-gotta-have-her gal, Mary Louise Parker, 45, looks WAY better than she did when I discovered her in Fried Green Tomatoes (the only thing good about that flick, in my eyes). And that movie was released in 1991, the same year as ... Only the Lonely.


As Paul Harvey would say, "And that's the rest of the Story ..."

The paint is no longer sticky for sure.  For those that made it this far, hope you enjoyed watching it dry with me.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Bringing It All Back Home

Some days - like today - I feel just like Martin Blank.  As though I've been out in the world lo these many years doing something at odds with who I thought I'd be (in his case, hit man; in mine, software development) and now I have the need to find my way back home.

That the killing is metaphorical for me rather than literal is a minor nitpick; that my wandering in the wilderness has been a helluva lot longer than Martin's 10 years means little more.  His ambivalence (and paradoxically, his compulsion) about the return home feels like me in a way few movie characters and circumstances have to my mind.

The assassin stuff is a just a distraction, it is 'home' itself that's the core conceit and consequently the piece I wrestle with. He's quite literally returning home and I don't even know what that means for me, since I don't think I've ever had one. Not the way he did.  Or rather the way he thinks he did. Still, having never been there doesn't mean I can't yearn to go back.

Maybe returning 'home' is simply getting back to who I wanted to be. Meaning it's okay now to be that person. Maybe that's the point.  Grosse Pointe Blank is nothing if not one metaphor wrapped in another.  In fact, Martin is not 'literally' doing anything (there's at least one subtext and ulterior meaning to every scene).

Reading this over, I see nothing but more of my navel-gazing psycho-babble bullshit.

In the end, maybe it's just a decent shoot-em-up/high school reunion/'love reunited at last' dark romantic comedy.  Plus it has an excellent soundtrack.

Welcome back Pointers.