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Hollywood

POETRY

THE CASTLE AMUSEMENTS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2.2K views

The large corrugated iron shed – flaking

whitewash almost turned to grey – has been closed

and empty now since the last recession.

Some say the arcades of slot machines remain,

cobwebbed, darkened and muted, until

that last trumpet in an eye’s twinkle

resurrects their glare and the ring of money.

 

Visitors to the Plantagenet castle

opposite – driving up the corkscrew lane

from the coastal road – note the peeling plywood

nailed to the windows, and the fading sign

above the padlocked double doors up the steps,

where, beneath AMUSEMENTS, is the vestige

of CINEMA. Imagine, between the Wars –

on a stuffy summer night, the doors wide

for what little air there might be – the castle keep,

far, far above the sea, filled with sounds

from the rich arcades of Tinsel Town:

Laurel and Hardy singing “In the Blue

Ridge mountains of Virginia on the trail of

the Lonesome Pine…” – or Selznick’s Gone With The Wind,

and Atlanta burning.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AT THE END OF THE PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.3K views

Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,

and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,

Country & Western Memorabilia,

Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;

past the sustainable hardwood benches

with withered in memoriam bouquets;

over the planking with its measured gaps

through which to view, like a bioscope,

the incoming tide shimmy then shake

the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,

slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;

next to where even the line fishermen

are starting to stow their gear, as an east wind

begins to blow, is the Mariner’s Lounge

with its faux fishing nets, its mounted

plastic cod, its framed chart of the North Wales coast.

 

Those Tinsel and Turkey pensioners

adventurous enough to leave their hotels –

crescented along the town’s North Shore –

are sipping, with the odd Walkers’ crisp,

a Rombout’s coffee, a Gallo chardonnay,

a Carling, a Guinness, and watching

Hollywood tv repeats in HD

as sudden rain squalls against the glass.

 

Oh, to be transported warmly, safely,

to Beverly Hills – via Mulholland Drive

and Santa Monica Boulevard –

where, to portentous chords, perfect mysteries

are perfectly solved by pensionable folk!

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on the site in 2016.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AT THE END OF THE PIER

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,

and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,

Country & Western Memorabilia,

Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;

past the sustainable hardwood benches

with withered in memoriam bouquets;

over the planking with its measured gaps

through which to view, like a bioscope,

the incoming tide shimmy then shake

the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,

slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;

next to where even the line fishermen

are starting to stow their gear, as an east wind

begins to blow, is the Mariner’s Lounge

with its faux fishing nets, its mounted

plastic cod, its framed chart of the North Wales coast.

 

Those Tinsel and Turkey pensioners

adventurous enough to leave their hotels –

crescented along the town’s North Shore –

are sipping, with the odd Walkers’ crisp,

a Rombout’s coffee, a Gallo chardonnay,

a Carling, a Guinness, and watching

Hollywood tv repeats in HD

as sudden rain squalls against the glass.

 

Oh, to be transported warmly, safely,

to Beverly Hills – via Mulholland Drive

and Santa Monica Boulevard –

where, to portentous chords, perfect mysteries

are perfectly solved by pensionable folk!

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

STILL LIFE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

In the central hall – more cathedral than
museum – the queue for the dinosaurs
curls round the replica skeleton
of a diplodocus. Though only four
and very excited, she waits patiently –
and, once we are in the gallery,
studies each exhibit: loves the T Rex
life-size model that moves, that snarls, that roars
and the loop of the movies’ take on these
‘terrible lizards’. The fascination
transcends generations –
real monsters definitively dead
and, if not buried, then truly ossified;
their thirteen thousand and thirty five
millennia, our fifty thousand;
their earth as distant as Hollywood’s.

We visit more megafauna. She leads me
through an aisle of glass-cased taxidermy
to view the carcass of a blue whale strung
from the vaulted ceiling. On the way out,
we pause at the fossilised skeleton
of a giant sloth. We are killing the whale,
as we killed the sloth – what will be left
is this necropolis, this charnel house
with the carved monkeys on its columns,
the faux gargoyles on its roof – and, of course,
real pigeons gobbling crumbs.

 

Note: the poem was first published in 2015 in LIVE FROM WORKTOWN – http://www.livefromworktown.org

 

 

 

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