say goodbye to hollywood

Poetry was gone within the week.

 

Maybe it was the bleak terrain.

 

The concrete sunshine.

 

The stench of nothingness.

 

This was no Sartrian exercise in stomach disorders.  This was where inspiration came to die.

 

After trudging itself up winding ribbons of asphalt, it came here, to this place, expecting to sit pretty atop the hill.  Instead, the hills tended to crumble underfoot, or slide down themselves like kindergartners at a water park and pretty was for sale at the corner store.

 

Not for the feint-hearted.  Though inspiration never thought of itself that way.  It had tended to thrive even in the darkest corners.  It had a way of finding the crack in the crevice where moss might grow.  It had made its living off resilience.  Its bread and butter was how it sought shine even when buried beneath layers and layers of bland, or banal, contrived or cowardly.  Its prowess lay in its navigational dynamics – it seemed always to be on a collision course with hallelujah whether at storefront Baptist Church or the Mount of Olives or Leonard Cohen’s exhale.  It knew where it stood.

 

Until today.  Until here.  Until what had happened.

 

It didn’t seem like much.

 

A simple whimper.  A laying down of trowel.  A momentary giving up on the task to wipe brow, sip cool lemonade in 120-degree sun that turned into siesta that transmogrified into hiatus that ended it all.

 

No one will tell what it is.  No one can say.  It can’t be put into words, not in any way that has meaning.  In fact, it is the end of meaning.  There is no context for this; there is no context left.

 

What buried here today itself so ephemeral so ephemeral

yet so eternal

that we cannot say

we simply cannot say.

 

It sure happened quick, though.

Best be vigilant, ever get a chance again.

 

There was once an expression for that,

but no longer.