Thirty-three

“Welcome to Hellywood! Some like it hot!”
wisecracks graffiti on a freeway’s wall;
“Abandon hope you dopes who drive by Christ!”
bawls a billboard outside a bricked-up church;
“No body? You’re nobody!” muscles in
a sweating gym on Sodom and Inferno;
“Hey, you’re a winner if you’re getting thinner,”
shills hype outside a liposuction doc.
That’s Hollywood! A smog of lies and greed
between the desert’s and the ocean’s sands,
where the sun shines three hundred days a year,
and heaven-sent beauty hell-bent on fame
trades soul and body for a speaking-role...

* * *

thirty-three is an R-rated “screenplay in verse” for a movie that will never be made; that is, unless you watch it in your mind’s eye.

In its thirty-three moments of love, it tells of a passionate and disturbed affair between a film director and a famous actress in Hollywood, where love is just the price you pay to get some fame, and “MGM” rhymes with “phlegm”.

Alternately bitterly cynical and intensely lyrical, thirty-three tells a story never to be told, the real identities of whose protagonists must forever remain secret.

thirty-three is Jaxy’s scandalous expose of the secret world at the heart of Hollywood.

* * *

When darkness pours the ocean of the moon
over the dunes of deserts without water,
the crushed seashells of the sand hear the sea,
and the dead dream of the night without morning.

When sorrow drums the conga of the moon
above the bitter tides of sugar-cane,
the coffins of the slave-ships sail the fields,
and the dead drag their chains of rusted tears.

When shadows spin the dollar of the moon
over the Capitols where wars are made,
men squeal as their soft throats are slit like pigs,
and pork is dressed as glory, greed as good.

When midnight hangs the clock-face of the moon
above the crowded centuries of death,
graves rise like islands from the infinite,
and, as you walk the wind, I cry your name.

Anna, Anna, Anna...