Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 1940
I left my capacity for hoping on the little
roads that led to Zelda’s sanitorium.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In this dark night, forgotten,
dissipation like leprosy on my face,
the ineradicable aura of gin about me
(although, please believe me, Zelda,
I haven’t drunk anything for months!),
I keep writing
but the snowy rejection slip is all I get,
the producer’s pencil on my scripts,
the cup of kindness filled with cement.
I carry a reputation, a scourge, that breaks my back,
just as our crazy life together broke you.
Before the volcano of words we spoke,
before all those eroding years,
before your disgust for me flared in your eyes,
I saw only love for me there.
I was the Jazz Age laureate,
you the quintessential flapper
—the new exotic, erotic woman,
laughing down Fifth Avenue on the roof of a cab,
jumping into the Plaza Fountain.
Our hopes flew and flashed
like the sequins on a flapper’s dress,
our future bright and unstoppable
as the flow of dollars before the Crash!
In this dark night, forgotten,
I keep writing words, more words
—flinging them into the darkness
for a posterity that no longer wants them.
.
Once He Wrote
Once he wrote
of unlocking the mystery in silence.
Once he wrote
at an ink-stained oak desk
seeking out elusive words, just out of reach.
Once he wrote
and the world cocked a literary ear.
Once he wrote
of a fox pursued by hounds,
the furious lather of escape to live again.
Once he wrote
but now his dreams have turned to nightmares.
Once he wrote
but now he sits transfixed,
—the fox finally cornered and cowed.
© Christopher T. George
Christopher T. George was born in 1948 in Liverpool, England, and came to the United States in 1955. He now resides in Newark, Delaware. Chris’s poetry has been published in Poet Lore, the American Poetry Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Loch Raven Review, Gargoyle, and The Times of London. He is a former editor of Loch Raven Review and a current board member of the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA). Chris has a poetry site at http://chrisgeorge.netpublish.net/
The Loch Raven Review 