Like everything else, an exercise in suspending disbelief, and therefore
in need of work. The central metaphor changed after I pasted this up so
what's here is totally new and (needless to say) tenuous.
HOLLYWOOD GESTHEMANE
The icon was bought from a monastery
that also sells dried fruit and prayer ropes,
and the image of course is of Jesus
in an expectedly (if you know the story)
untriumphant posture: on his knees,
groveling, a nasty prefiguration
of an abandoned blacklisted actor
who made the wrong friends and
kept the wrong company, left now
friendless and in terror,
crawling before his boss who only shrugs,
puffs on a twelve-buck Cohiba,
and waves his thumb toward the exit door.
Stare again at the face in the icon
and it speaks volumes (or Gospels),
of knowledge of the big surprise
that really isn't if you have half a brain:
that life and death are as fragile
as Kleenex in a typhoon,
and that for all the talk about the kid
as the Son of Man of whom the boss is oh-so-proud,
when the going gets tough the boss
will sacrifice his only begotten son
faster than Stalin dropped Yakov,
and the kid is no more than another
sucker for his own rhetoric
who made some nasty choices, and
whose fair hearing is a reminder as the door
hits him on the way out:
we made the deal, you can't leave it,
so you have to take it, and think about
working Off Broadway.
KTW/9-15-09
(For J. Edward Bromberg who fathered Conrad Bromberg who is a friend of
Harvey Perr who acted with me in a play I wrote.)
--
Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/ http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
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