7/28/07

Those austere thin silver fonts of the Chevrolet dealership and Rooms to Let signs
Painted on brick buildings, when dirty old men posed as small-time producers
With portable casting-couches, when farmers’ daughters changed careers
And stripped for lucre, were immortalized in scratchy color-faded one-reelers.
Where medallioned cheesy directors mattered, where unctuous bare-chested
Medallioned director cum analysts with their casting-couches mattered,
Where back-lot 3-reelers made or broke careers. Where bilingual bank interpreters
Cast off old careers and wardrobes. Where cheesy shirts baring medallioned chests
were cast off where shirts were recycled, where medallions were melted into bronze,
where toupees worn by bare-midriffed group-grope participants were rewoven
into synthetic palls. Where miniskirts or lacy underpants were returned to rag content paper,
where paper turned to trash, where dust became dust. Where the hair on the chest
on which a cheesy medallion of bronze is draped becomes a toupee, where the president
of the company is not only the client, where the customer becomes the president
and where the last becomes first, where the group-grope participant who hugged
a co-participant in the bath became the president, where the waters of the bath
were Babylon’s, where they were life, they were a watery stalk from the ground.