stairs to the stars [updated]

these are the stairs [said my friend] where the fat one and the skinny one delivered the piano

actually… it was the second time they delivered an incredibly cumbersome instrument of humiliation up those stairs the first time was in the silent era when they were selling washing machines door-to-door but when sound came they said “we must do it again and this time with a piano!”

and so they did and the glorious cacophony of clangs and bangs and bongs and clongs provided the soundtrack to their biggest and weirdest hit

the stairs remain
running up the hill
but where vast manicured lawns
flanked them in the past
cheap unimaginative apartment building
slacking both vision and view
hem them in today

my friend threaded his way through the narrow arcane alleys of a once fashionable Los Angeles neighborhood past Mandarin restaurants Mexican auto shops and failed hipster venues to the stairs to the stars where the fat one and the skinny one labored like Sisyphuses in shirtsleeves and overalls carting their ungainly cargo up the steep six story climb for all eternity

what caught my eye, however
was an impromptu memorial
of flowers and votive candles
sitting on the foot of the stairs
not to honor the celluloid gods
but to briefly note
the vanishing flicker of flame
that had once been a single human life

and unlike
the gods of comedy
who climbed to the heavens above
the subject
of this temporal memorialwas already
dead and forgotten
his brief life extinguished
in a moment of vain pride
when he or someone else
tried to prove
their life mattered

that was years ago
the memorial is long since gone
the friends and family who erected it
long since dispersed across
the city
the county
the continent
and even the immortal gods of comedy
are fading from view
leaving only the steps
cracked and crumbling
under the sullen California sun

text © Buzz Dixon