Merdre (merci, M. Jarry!) Orig title was HARDWOOD, changed it to
Hollywood when the whole focus moved on me.
Kenneth Wolman wrote:
> 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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