Poem: A Letter to MGM, 1928-1933 (2014)

Ordinarily, I post an original piece on the last day of the month, but since August ended on a Sunday, it lost out to new Who and was pushed back until today.  But that's all right; I've started shifting my Buster Keaton posts to Mondays, and August's poem, is quite apropos.

*          *          *

A Letter to MGM, 1928-1933

You bought yourself a comic genius

To set on a shelf,
A somber little clown in slapshoes
Whose flat, crooked hat
Kept his ideas from spilling out.

Buster was just a word
Until he somersaulted down a flight of stairs
And made it a name.

His imagination was kinetic,

And when someone turned him loose,
He was like a wind-machine cyclone.
He built cockeyed patchwork house
That revolved at the foundation
And told silent puns over telegraph wires.
He shared the screen with a bovine leading lady;
He fought a deep-sea duel with a swordfish
And rode the collapse of a crumbling automobile.

He was a slapstick pioneer

Who danced a soft shoe with himself in 1920 –
Two Busters onscreen,
Three Busters side by side,
Nine Busters all in a how’d-he-do-that row.
He knew that a picture
Was something to eat and sleep
And dream,
And he never found a home
In your static joke factories.
It was like enlisting Einstein
To make a vinegar volcano,
Or Turing to crack a Sudoku.

He made pictures that moved,

But you only wanted pictures that talked.
He used to tumble,
End-over-end pirouetting
With an athletic vaudeville grace
That only looked like clumsiness.
He broke his ribs
To tickle ours,
Knowing full well
That stuntmen don’t get the laughs.

When he was yours,

You wrapped your commodity in cotton;
He was an action figure
And you kept him in the package.
At most, you’d let him pratfall,
And in between recitations
Of someone else’s idea of humor,
He’d stumble hard out of frame
With a microphone-shaking crash.

His mind was a Rube Goldberg device

That came up with something
Glittering and original
Every time he turned it over.
He understood that the cab of a car
Could stay afloat and set sail,
That retrofitted stovetops
Could fry records along with eggs,
And that ladders could become seesaws
When he perched, cat-like, in the absolute center.
He drew laughs from anything –
As large as waterfalls of his own construction,
As small as a handful of glue.

He outran rolling, accelerating boulders,

Downtown cattle stampedes,
And armies of Keystone cops.
Only you tripped him up and caught him,
Grinding him down to fit
The round holes
Of your prefab, cookie-cutter comedies.

You picked him up as another star

For your collection
And then wondered why he strained
At the edges of your constellation.
Didn’t you know he wasn’t made
To be contained within
Some tidy studio system?
What did you think would happen
When you tried to hold
A supernova in a box?
Five years with you,
And he was choked down to embers.
He spent the rest of his life
Scrambling up the side of his career
Like a fire escape,
Slowly fanning himself
Back into
Light.