[10/08/2026][POETRY]The Hollywood Sign is Dark
Three Poems by Brent L. Smith
Graveyard Earth no. 2
Recorded at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, summer 2025On this forever America
On this graveyard earth
Reality is an inside job
And I am the author
Getter of death
And I take your words
your language
your dead symbols
your archive
your thought-forms
I make the dead speak
And I cannot speak*
I am purveyor of spirits
Hustler of the distilled essence
Middleman to slurred altered
states
In underground bars
Subterranean haunts
Hollywood Blvd. bowels
Even our ghosts are stars
Saturn has returned
And I’m saving up to open a tiki
bar on Mars
To do the bidding of an old ghost
Older than history
Older than law
Older than Christ
Spirits just want what any ghosts want—a body
I’ve lived lifetimes, kid
A ghost lost in memory
I’m gripped with Wisconsin death
trip visions
My father was a miner
His fathers were miners
Their skin souls colored obsidian
inside out
from down in those hell-deep
caverns
emerging nothing but empty hands
and sick children
and wives gone mad
and they go eyes closed in a poor
man’s box
by their own hand
pistol is a poor man’s only prize
closed coffin on hard Midwestern
dirt
nobody but other miners
shabby clothes
cigarette mutters
motheaten fedoras
the priest is the best dressed man
reading hymns of a faraway
god
On this forever America
On this graveyard earth
Reality is an inside job
Curly Sue
for O. AdeleWrapped in knotted limbs
under rare endless LA rain
Aftermath breath of ravenous weekday sex,
wondering what to do next
Phone lights up—
“Do nothing together”
Co-Star notification
that felt more pantheistic decree
Tall-dark-gorgeous curly sue in my bed
“You are nice to devour”
(Lover me or writer me?)
She has librarian countenance
She has olive skin & very long stems & coiled raven locks
that shower me unpredictably
Her bites leave bruises on my arms and shoulders
“Do nothing together”
We’re eating breakfast at noon at Cindy’s Diner
I am pissing bloody,
it gives you an exuberance renewed about life—pissing blood
She doesn’t mind the blood or me pissing it
“How’s your blood?”
Her eyes say she’s insatiable
She has no appetite for diner food,
just my skin & blood & library books
She sucks my tongue as she lets loose her librarian moans
“You are nice to devour”
She might’ve left her librarian job
to join the Manson Family
if she were born in 1949
But she was born in 1999,
the year of the great Prince Party
50 years too late to be a Manson girl
So she is here in my bed
under rare endless LA rain
biting my skin,
devouring me ravenously—
like I was one of her library books
I imagine her
on rainy days
when no one else is in the library,
picking up returned library books,
and biting them insatiably,
hard enough to leave a bruise—
before putting them back on the shelf
Pool Lights
Witch rhymes with switch
We’re not witches
We’re switches
(Hehehehehehehehe)
Or snitches
Oops
Snitches get stitches
“Snitches will be taken care of”
Said Squeaky Fromme
I wonder what she meant
Sitting there
Cradling her pump-action shotgun
Revolution 9 in LA
Late summer is an ominous time
If you have a pool then
At least you can drown
Out the screams
If you’re underwater
You can’t hear anyone
Scream at night
In these canyons
Silence & the warm glow
Of the pool light
I’m in Hollywood
& my Third Eye is calcified
This used to be
The land of prophecy
Of cults & subliminal code &
Parties with spiral staircase
The Hollywood Sign is dark
Silver Lake is drained
Where is my prophecy?
Would I know it
If I saw it?
I can’t see I
Can just hear
The endless traffic
Of the 101 rush by like
A dirty river
The coyotes crying
Over a fresh kill
The low hum
Of crickets
In a city that’s stopped
Dreaming
Mickey Mouse dismembered on the wall
Harvey Wallbanger bangs angrily
On Magic Castle walls
His cocktail spilling, says,
“Keep the magic down!”
I think of prophecy I
Think of Seraphim phone calls
Red pool lights in my backyard like
Eyes through the window
Something horrifically awakening
That scares us finally again
Into true vision
Into dreams we won’t ever
Forget
BRENT L. SMITH is a writer from LA. He’s the author of Pipe Dreams on Pico, Nation of Dirty Assholes, Edendale Society, and Gambling Hell in No Time. He went to the Jack Kerouac School, when he was cool. If you’ve been abducted by aliens or your apartment is haunted he wants to hear about it.