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Collected Poetry

    (rd king dot net)
poetry and digital art

In California

  Our True Story 


Briefly,

when we were young we lived in a small court
in West Hollywood, much like the one John
Schlesinger used in 'The Day of the Locust.'
We led a sort of real life based loosely on fact
and the oddness of time.  By day we worked in a
      westside bookstore—
she as the receptionist while I waited on stars
like Vic Morrow, Jane Fonda, and Nancy Feldon;
even Fay Wray once appeared briefly, weakened
and brittle, at the top of the mezzanine stairs.
At night we strolled to the Oriental on Sunset
Boulevard or drank red wine and watched the shadows
from the poinsettias turn Marlowesque in the evening
light.  Ours was a living largely made of longing
charged by desire.  Ours was a life patterned on
lives sometimes fictional, and sometimes not:

while she slept my seed swam to the depths
of her ocean; I dreamt I lived in Hollywood
in 2020-something in an old boarding house
that looked very much like the one
outside our kitchen window where ancient palms
were overgrown with luxuriant morning glory.
It was the evening light that fell ( that fell )
at such an untenable angle as to make all of this
extraordinary in that articulate sense of drama
we all readily accept.  I shared this ocular life
with a troop of rapscallions and one, tall, stern
woman who ran the house.  For one night of fun
we pulled the legs off of our mechanical servant—
who was notable in his mimicry of our appearance,
affectation, and who was exceptional in a cameo role as
I awoke shaken, euphoric, and deeply, deeply moved.


 
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