Libera-cheeze

Watched Behind the Candelabra on HBO last night with Dean. I was really looking forward to this movie, especially with all the top actors involved, Matt Damon playing the young lover Scott Thorson (from whose POV the story is told), Michael Douglas playing Liberace, Debbie Reynolds as his mother, Rob Lowe as their very stoned plastic surgeon, Dan Akroyd as the manager, Scott Bakula as the hunky gay friend who originally introduces them. It had some decent reviews in the local paper. But oh my, this was not a very good movie at all. Not only was the story lame, and superficial, and full of gay clichés, the acting was pretty awful. No wonder it never had a theatrical release and went straight to cable TV. Yikes. I mean, how many times can you have the same scene of Douglas and Damon sipping champagne in the hot tub having a fight? It could have been so much more.

I love this poem from the current issue of Poetry.  The "boom" is so understated, and it all takes on a new urgency with the recent Marathon Bombing in Boston.

Bye-bye

BY DEREK SHEFFIELD

The animal of winter is dying,

its white body everywhere

in collapse and stabbed at

by straws of   light, a leaving

to believe in as the air

slowly fills with darkness

and water drains from the tub

where my daughter, watching it

lower around her, feeling it

go, says about the only thing

she can as if it were a long-

kept breath going with her

blessing of dribble and fleck.

Down it swirls a living drill

vanishing toward a land

where tomorrow already

fixes its bright eye on a man

muttering his way into a crowd,

saying about the only thing

he can before his body

goes boom. And tomorrow,

I will count more dark shapes

tumbling from the sky, birds

returning to scarcity, offering

in their seesawing songs

a kind of   liquidity.