POETRY: Hollywood, A Love Poem

Hollywood
A Love Poem

Or

A sort of poetical essay on living in the City of the Angels, with observations on the flora and fauna to be found therein

by
David Tarleton


Imagine, if you will,
A City of Dreams,
A City of Dreamers,
City of the self-deluded
And the half-mad.

16 lane superhighways criss-cross
the desert landscape,
immobile in my car,
the traffic backed up all the way to Downey
from an overturned tanker,
polluting the dust this time, not the air
with the poison fumes
I breathe in all day,
Like the creative breath,
the ruach
Of some demented demiurge.

City of Angels
City of Dream
City of Falsehood
City of Pain
I love you
I hate you
I resent you
I covet you

Angelyne’s 40 foot tall breasts hang pendulously overhead, like some kind of perverted Paleolithic Earth Mother, smothering us all in her silicone mammaries, her face disfigured beyond human recognition, like the lost white member of the Jackson clan, on billboards across the cityscape, paid for with favors and a millionaire sugar daddy.

Better still than Dennis Woodruff, with his “make My movie” and his Paper mache heads, living out in a trailer park on the edge of town, dreaming the good dream, if only…

If only…

If only someone would discover me
If only they’d make my screenplay, hire me, cast me, give me my big break,
Once I do my one big thing
It’s easy street

Maybe I just need to become a scientologist.

But no one else will make the move for you
You can’t wait for someone else to discover you
Materialize your own dreams

That’s the Big Lie that Hollywood sells you, the big lie of overnight success,
An overnight success that takes 15 years of peddling your ass on streetcorners and,
Being fake polite to everyone you think can help your career,
As your nose moves beyond brown into ultraviolet
And your soul slowly darkens,
From the compromises
And the lies
And the rejection.

Becoming famous won’t suddenly make those people who rejected you love you.
If the cool kids, or that girl who made fun of you in the 7th grade, or your dad finally decide that you don’t suck anymore,
Who gives a shit?
It still doesn’t fill that empty place inside of you.

It’s naïve to think that
the American Dream, Hollywood-style,
Will suddenly replace the missing elements in you.

Success and happiness are not synonyms
Although, sometimes, one can lead to the other

The objective shouldn’t be to become rich and famous,
It should be to wake up happy every morning.

It’s easy to sell ourselves short,
And whore ourselves out for a crust of bread
When there are other bakeries
Hollywood isn’t the only baker in town,
It’s just got the sexiest billboards

I imagine standing on the roof of my car, screaming out at the people entering through the front gates at Paramount:
“Rise up, rise up against the machine that seduces you into being a cog in a globalized multinational media conglomerated machine that spews out infotainment designed to lull you into a trance so they can program you to buy their crap
Fight for the art of what you do, not just the commerce.”
But if I did that, I think they’d probably lock me up as un-American.

A thousand thousand meet and greets
Midnight parties in the Hollywood Hills, with wannabe movie starlets in the hottub, clad only in their naked ambition
For this is the Holy Land, the Mecca for the tragically dispossessed,
Who desperately need to prove their self-worth
By seeing their pictures up in checkout lines.

But it’s easy when thinking of the seduction of fame
To forget about selling your soul to get there
And to forget about the stalker, uninvited, in your living room, munching on Doritos, claiming, to the police, to be your fiancé.

Am I bitter? No, not bitter. Wise, perhaps. Wise enough now, wisdom hard earned, wise enough to sniff out the liars, the hypocrites, the penny ante hustlers more interested in being a big shot than in making anything of value. Cynical, yes, but it’s this city that’s made me so.

Am I cynical? Perhaps. But I still haven’t left,
Like a junkie who just needs that one more fix,
Or the gambler who plays just one more hand
To get his car out of hock.

I’m still here
Even though sometimes I think about leaving,
But something always keeps me here,
Fixated on a dream.
A dream that I know I will reach
Because I know I’m good enough
And I’m better than those other bums,
But I guess that’s what those other bums think, too,
So we all work,
And we wait,
And we hope
And we desire
And it might just happen.
I mean, heck, Dennis Woodruff finally did make his movie.
I saw it.
It sucked.