By-Gones In Black & White

Tucked safely within
another animal's skin,
safe from what lay beneath
whim of wickedness had exceeded the reach--
as devils, perhaps expose too much
of an inner, private world
that her hand rare failed to clutch
a long leather jacket, hid a demon girl

And an imperfect youth
wishing herself away into the blue
of what she had seen other women do.
Among the shadows below Hollywood-land, into
the withdrawal into the fool
as she was frequently asked to expose
herself, and of course, show her costume
to dreaming men, lost in wily throes

Speaking through the eyes, dreaming her apart
while I had become but an immigrant's American shard
from an old country that I might only have seen
through the eyes of my grandfather's memories--
What promise that he had believed must be
to leave what he had loved, to one day love me
as his "chum," as the guesses came fast and free
about people I had never even heard of, who or what they mean

Watching in from a lost world of black and white movies
where every Italian, either a lover or a gangster must be
and some cheap cigar to represent a fulfillment of the dream--
perhaps if I laid out my mockingbird Brooklyn accent, the scheme
may have been more obvious, though he never sounded like
he had ever even been to New York City.
I kept my own world hidden behind a glass, and her final night

Into some another fantasy-land, darkening away into the fade
of my own imagination of a myriad hue and shade--
singing a brand new song, without any broken dreams of Broadway
unstruck and loosened the moorings, following a tide ebbing away...
Unto a place where what could, and what could never happen
inevitably found some tall, dark and handsome hero--
before the next days paper printed her picture, and some another the end...
perhaps filling in the silent blanks left by Greta Garbo.

Uley