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THAT SUMMER WHEN HEAT BURNED LIKE A SPIRIT

Life branded invisible crosses
on your Ruddy transient's heart
while chic lesbians danced in supper clubs
the year of the North Las Vegas riots.
There in a tundra of once fertile weed
the clown gamblers met to water need.
The bread of shadows made hunger
on closed lips dark with waiting.
Ruddy tipped his baseball cap
to the ladies, a Chaplinesque smile
freed his despair into a leer.
It was deep summer, 'hood kids ran
through entranced alleyways
stained by random bloodlettings
while Ruddy avoided The Preacher
& His mobile chapel: an ice cream truck
advertising a painted yellow cross
on its aged, blanched body.
Safer to be a pagan at heart,
claimed Ruddy, dreaming to himself
a wealth of good things
in a desert where the bad ruled,
& gangbangers tagged walls
with DNA-painted cursives
only the illiterate read
from the pen of Chicano inmates
all the streets ran wild with red.



BRING BACK THE SILENTS

Somehow Ruddy the transient was hired
to be a drunken extra in a TV movie
being filmed in summertime Vegas,
& he showed up so totally drunk
the director thought Ruddy was acting,
complimenting him on "Method Realism."
The director decided to give Ruddy
a drawn-out death scene (in close-up)
at the Blue Angel hotel-casino:
Ruddy would be shot during a hold-up
by the film's washed-up leading man,
a deadringer for Robert Blake ...
But during the improvisational take
Ruddy -- who resembled Ben Turpin,
the mustachioed silent film comic --
coughed fitfully, & began babbling
in loud deracination, so wildly
that the film's star forgot his lines
throughout what movie critics
would later give 4-stars to:

the moving survival of "real people"
screaming for "HELP!"
in dangerous Hollywood,
where many stunt men croak
mutely before cameras.