Life: The Director’s Cut

by D.G. Geis

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O Lord God,
could anyone have made
 
anything as fucked up as LA?
I’m sure from your height
 
everything looks like bird droppings
on a Hyundai hood.
 
But from my plush armchair
in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriot
 
in lively downtown Burbank,
it appears you have a plan.
 
Oh, I don’t blame you
for wanting to off yourself.
 
But must you take
the rest of us with you?
 
So here I sit in a hotel lobby
drinking coffee from a waxed cup
 
with its carefully crafted corrugated
cardboard lawyer protector
 
listening to a lady from Nebraska
talk about something called the LA Galaxy,
 
which I am now beginning to suspect
is not a sport team,
 
but a blurry spot on the chest x-ray
of your balsa wood Creation.
 
And while traffic stalls
on West Empire Blvd,
 
a minor stoppage
somewhere in LA’s small bowel,
 
I feel it my bounden duty
to register a formal complaint.
 
The actors are untrained,
the plot is redundant,
 
the Director is self-indulgent,
and like all cinema verite,
 
what makes it so real,
is that nothing is.
 
So please tell me
that I haven’t accidentally stepped
 
through a wormhole
in my immaculately clean
 
H2O metered low flush eco-sensitive
hotel restroom toilet,
 
passed through to an alternate universe,
and violated The Prime Directive
 
by bringing this to your attention.
Me, a hanged man wiggling his toes
 
just before his neck breaks.
And You, you faithless bastard,
 
prowling the heavens
like a male mantis
 
with an eye for the ladies.