Escape (no one said the coming dystopia would be so tedious)
Return to form for the Times Square landscape.
Still, it’s a shock we didn’t get back there
before these recent news reports of rape
and grand and petty larcenies, bugbears
not-so fantastical, and mundane scrapes
pushed back in mind the eighties’ Gotham scares.
Some picture heroes rushing in to save
us from ourselves or just to blow it all
to pieces. Vibrant cities turn to graves
of crime, dropped commerce, all else that appalls…
and still the apathetic deem to stave
off this decline by winking at the sprawl.
Not fleeing is what’s frankly cowardly
if we shield eyes in acts of worried pleas.
Sidekicks and Dames
Neglected and disowned works place among
the serious to view under new eyes,
for years can rectify bias and lies
bandied about as critics’ common song.
Is there no teaching of film history?
And do the scoffers know of Gunga Din?
Life must be safe, and stereotypes are sins.
So, anything goes? No? We’re so free!
The damsel isn’t errant as you felt,
and Mr. Round is a fine child performer.
These thoughts may shock as special effects melts:
I’m just a simple fan, no social reformer,
and I’ll embrace the tomatoes you pelt
for your pretense makes you the best performer.
Christopher Fried lives in Richmond, VA. A poetry collection All Aboard the Timesphere was published in 2013. His novel Whole Lot of Hullabaloo: A Twenty-First Century Campus Phantasmagoria was published in 2020. Recently, he was an advisor on the 1980s science fiction film documentary In Search of Tomorrow (2022).
Grand Little Things 