Ace Hotel, Downtown LA Exterior, Jesus Saves Reverse
The reverse of lasting mystery is industrial steel and neon,
shadows crosshatched onto the Chase bank and Broadway,
above the drudgery of believing one god better than another.
From an aerial view, two red words shout across rooftop LA,
in English in all weather, day and night, which is an act of faith
in a realtor who hawked the hotel one unit at a time with always
a dozen wait-listed like first-come-first-serve rooms in Heaven.
Inside, the newest occupants watch Sugar Ray connect and snap
back Jake LaMotta’s head in Raging Bull, though Robert DeNiro
is LaMotta and this Sugar Ray is an actor who unhands the ropes
as blood drips to the canvas and onto his boxing shoes, the blood
that is a checklist of what we gather while asking, What fresh hell
is this? Everywhere else, it’s the unexpected rise of the girl who
could be any of us. You can’t elevate one above another forever
and expect anything but mistrust. Go on. Show me a better god.
I’ll show you a city and messaging constellating above a world
of brutalized actors. Show me the wide, wide shore of sorrow.
I’ll find a place out of the wind where the unlucky can pause
to knock down a wasp nest and grind it into sand-nothing,
porous death belling up as that which the angels unhand.
Photograph by Spencer Lowell.
About Roy Bentley
Prolific poet and fiction writer Roy Bentley studs this new offering, “Ace Hotel, Downtown LA Exterior, Jesus Saves Reverse” with gems:
“wait-listed like first-come-first-serve rooms in Heaven.”
and
“blood / that is a checklist of what we gather while asking, What fresh hell / is this?”
and
“wide, wide shore of sorrow”
and
“porous death belling up as that which the angels unhand.”
Roy’s work, hard-won in the boxing ring of experience, never lets us down. Glad to see his work here again.
Bravo Ray, Bravo-Gossamer Threads of Steel, Amen