Savor the Sizzle and Sparkle of Hollywood
By
David Gottfried
I do not want to seem like a monochromatic, tiresome monk who only gives his readers brooding, ruing pieces that bemoan the sorry state of society. Accordingly, I will brighten your weary eyes with stuff that’s all about celebrity. I am giving you poems I wrote about various celebrities:
Taking Dustin Hoffman’s Place in the Graduate
Anne Bankcroft:
Do you want me to seduce you?
David Gottfried:
Yes, I want you to seduce me
I went to smell your slithering stockings
Evil of Eve, apple of my eye
You bitch, you beautifully beckon my fall
Yes, I want you to seduce me.
To accuse me
To prove me to myself
Rip away my flirting shirt
Those elongated tails that mimic a skirt
Make them see my muscled girth
Down with the jeans
Make me be so dreadfully obscene
Show me how evil you really are
Bathed in Vaginal Acid
Your eyes singed our eyes like laser beams
And your voice
Was more regal than Elizabeth the First and Julius Caeser all
Rolled into one Androgynous Monster
When I saw your legs “slipping into stockings”
I wanted to dive down deep and eat
Climbing your Immaculate White Thighs
Into your eternally virginal heart, splendidly sarcastic
Go ahead, go ahead and mock me
Your sarcasm only stiffens my will
Your pouting pulchritude
The vinegar in your kisses
Is an elixir that makes Viagra seem tame
Your contempt is polished and made crystalline
A sneering precious gem beating the market
Slicing the truth into different facets of the same heartless stone
Twinkling out of both sides of your preening portal
Inviting and rejecting, inviting then rejecting
You oscillate like a metronome
Making the beat that strides through “Mrs. Robinson”
Prideful, portentous, a svelte rock n roller till the end
An Ode to the Actress Glenda Jackson
Glenda Jackson is the loveliest lemon
Her lapidary syllables shine
Soar above the muck of life
Like rarest, whitest wine
She slices, dices all objections
With the archest speech
With grandest, mad soliloquies
All powers she’ll impeach
Her hair of gold gleams like the sun
Her limbs are taut and quick
A coiled, crafty grandest dame
She’ll burn you to the wick
Every part that she embarks
Becomes her property
A vaulted, vain, victorious stage
For her profundity
She emits the sparks of life
She sizzles, yes she does
Bursting, beaming, always blithe
One thinks one is but was
HOMAGE TO SENATOR EUGENE MCCARTHY
“I’m twice as bright as Stuart Symington
Twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey
And twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy”
Remarks attributed to Eugene McCarthy
at the 1960 Democratic Convention
When I was young, the men in the news
Became nations in my imagination
Where I made McNamara and Jubilee
Like Jack and Jackie, stunning and free
And Jackie was France, passionately
Floral with freedom, perfumed with glee
They whirled across a marble floor
With chandeliers and gowns galore
And killer queens, the scarlet war
The soaring, mauling, gorgeous gore
And Madame Ngu with dazzle and shine
Made herself a witch divine
And timid scholars quite supine
Told us that the war was fine
It glared and stared with Napalm eyes
And wished a pagan pagoda's demise
It spun a web of sugared lies
And we all dined on alibis
And McNamara, that mannered man
Sedate and starched like an Englishman
Counted the kills according to plan
Obeyed his Reich like Marshal Petain
For Humphrey it was a glorious war
And Symington just an aside
For JFK a political chore
Clean for Gene, I swoon like a bride
The final three poems have appeared on other posts I placed on substack. For example, the final two poems appeared in my post “Odes to Rock n Roll.” They appear here as well because this post is reserved for poems about celebrities.
AND I HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH NIGHT EVER SINCE YOU DIED
"When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."
Robert Kennedy, quoting from Romeo and Juliet at the 1964 Democratic Convention
Lead me into war Bobby Kennedy
Lead me into that holiest of wars
Crashing into the gates of hell bloody and beautiful on a
Night satin ride of hating love
Like fires foresting through the hills and dales
In every mournful slum screaming for your sun.
The son of god
Of Jesus you were
You were Jesus Bobby Kennedy
And I have been in love with night ever since you died
I want to die with you Bobby Kennedy.
Caring not for the brain dead ways that they call calm,
I want to grab onto your car and never let go.
Going faster, faster as the spring sweeps its storms,
As Lucy's vengeful diamonds rain Tet's fire
on all our Souths of rice and cotton.
As the teaming, screaming colored kids dance in your waves
Calling sweetly, meekly, cryingly,
We loved you Bobby Kennedy
Of Caesar of Chavez of my Mark Antony
Of the Hot Roman Streets blinding the Night.
That merry mad catholic cacophony,
of Irish and Latins and Jews with a Hebrew Soul.
Of Subways singing all the way to Harlem and Nathan's
and Coney Island.
Of Knishes and Pizzas and Hot Dogs,
and we hope we didn't give you indigestion.
We loved you Bobby Kennedy
Of all the Strikes and Smokestacks of Aunt Rose
and Uncle Lou
Of all the tears of Jersey towns huddling to your death train
Of the Cities of the Summer streaming to your sight
Of the sad sooted buildings billowing with your people
Of West Side Story and all the Marias who cried for you
Of how your brother, too, was killed by a white man
Of the aching heart that knows it is too coarse a thing to heal.
That cannot heal until it caresses you and tells you
We loved you Bobby Kennedy
Our Prince
Our knight
In Shining White Armour
Whose Golden Hair Glistened in the Sun
Whose sweet emanations gleamed like
Jackie's jewels
Our Sergeant Pepper careening on California waves,
You are John Lennon, you are Lord Byron
Shouting Sonnets at Chillon.
You are the man whom every good man wanted to be.
We loved you Bobby Kennedy
For John Lennon and the Beatles
Beatles music can make me very angry
“Eleanor Rigby” is soft and sweet and stoically all alone
And “Hey, you’ve got to hide your love a way”
Is a gay man before Stonewall
And if you slander their melancholy majesty
I’ll bust every bone in your beautiful body
When I listened to Lennon’s manifold pronunciations of the word, “Oh”
So coy, so cute, so coquettishly ensconced in a Sergeant’s suit of silk
And every sweet syllable was manna, mothers’ milk
A clarion call and antidote to politics, war and filth
When his sweetness insinuated itself into our legs and loins
We danced to take a chance and fashion our romance
From head, heart and black coal soul to our thumping groins
We glanced upon the fifties with sarcasm like a lance
When I knew I was his brother, his chaste lover, his main man
We donned the rings of Diamonds of Lucy in the Skies
We discarded all the flotsam of the useless alibis
We brought heaven down to earth and were the greatest guys
I took an effervescent acid trip to the Heart of Darkness
Marveling in the many transmuted into one
The throngs of loving laughter reduced to utter death
And I am lost and all alone, for now and ever after
Give it Up for Little Micky Jagger
Rubied in the Tuesdays, the black and purple pouts
Imbibing illicit elixirs in copious amounts
Preening and screaming and annihilating doubts
Jagger’s on a roll, his army charging, routs
All is red and purple, violent violet hues
The beat is hard and driving, the energy accrues
The mass is in mayhem, Pentecostals in pews
Reveling in vibrant, immoral avenues
He wears scarfs of scarlet, rampaging on the stage
Exuding and extruding, a manic, joyous rage
He burns with a fever you cannot hope to gauge
From this warlock’s spell, you cannot disengage
His Sister is Morphine, his cousin is cocaine
When he speaks he scowls with eminent disdain
His hair’s a black flower that does not need the rain
Belittling the sun, the plenitude of the plain
His legs come from a cheetah or another feral beast
Velocity and vim are always waxed, increased
When he strides he rises, as certainly as yeast
He dances like a shaman, an animistic priest
He has all the grandeur of a brilliant British Lord
Ruling with arrogance over the galling horde
His breeches are stunning, his form is adored
The teeming teenage girls, are mesmerized and floored
The concert is a mass, the guitar is a scepter
The music a liturgy of the adolescent sector
The stereo, a prayer book, for the pious collector
And Jagger, a madman, for a time our lord and master
Copyright, David Gottfried, 1993 to 2021