Caesar & the Hula Dancer

A Poem by Paris Hlad

An Antique Movie Loosely Based on Caesar’s

Love Affair with a Charming Hula Dancer

My Recollection of the Events

Associated with the Loss of My Parents

Is Similar to a Silent Movie of Absurd Vignettes,

Most of Which Are Merely Offensive or Grotesque -

But the Cruelest of Them Provoke a Tender Smile,

That Is Callously Slapped from My Face

By a Cold and Invisible Hand.

-Autumn 2013-

-Pleasantries-

Our expressions of goodwill

Were absurdly out-of-character,

And just off American Boulevard

At a Sunoco station in Richfield

And although the old man

Could not stand untroubled,

He had gone many years

Without morphine,

And had not so much as

Heard about hospice care:

That was down the road away

So, we gulped milk as children do

And bit donuts like silverback apes

We watched people go in and out,

Watched cars fill up and leave �"

And we stood together

By an ice dispenser

We were for a while

Foolishly in love,

Convinced that you don't have to

Go somewhere swell to feel swell,

When one of you

Is about to be dead.

-Inquiries-

But now my mother

Wobbles like the hula,

And giggles well each

"Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral."

And I note a mischief

In her dead-pan eyes

That makes me feel

Crazier than she is

And sadder than

I’ve ever been

And still, I do not tell her

That her Joe-John’s dead -

Too-ra-loo-ra-li!

"Where is my nurse?" she asks.

You'll see her soon,” I sigh.

“Where is my love?” she moans,

And then, things go awry

-Cuts to the Quick-

But his dust is more like

Chalk upon a playground,

Sprayed in tiny clumps

On autumn grass

The "little measure"

Antony said of Julius -

For he bestrode the world,

Like a b*****d Child-Colossus -[1]

So slighted was that one expression!

"Oh, when comes such another! “

-Postscript-

I have become an illegible,

Inarticulate, and unread poem �"

Something that was done in the interim

To fill a gap between fear and outrage.

[1] Paris did not attend his father’s funeral at Fort Snelling. He got lost on the freeway and could not find the largest cemetery in Minneapolis, a city he claimed to know like the back of his hand. He was told that the military-style ceremony proceeded without incident. Guns were fired, and a young marine presented casings to his brother.