As some readers might know, my eldest daughter and I have a deal that in progress and process.  She wants to be a good writer and asked me who I thought a good writer was.  From this conversation we made a mutual deal.  We watch The Twilight Zone together.  This is so that she might learn how to write meaningful stories as she desires to do.  In return, she had one simple request…. that I write a new poem for each episode of the series.

As time has gone on, she’s been a little more merciful.  On realizing that the task is a little more daunting to her daddy, my little angel has given me a little break.  Write the first season’s worth by end of year and she’ll let me write the rest over the coming years.  We’ll see how that goes.  I think she just likes seeing if I keep my promises the best that I can.  I think that’s about right.   So, I give it my best.

From The Twilight Zone Season 1, Episode 23:

A World of Difference
by Michael Romani

What lies behind a simple man's face
But a vast and open sense of space
Where a simple scene seen as reality
Might as easily fade into surreality
Arthur Curtis walks in seeming to be real
But the manufactured mind does more than feel

An excitement felt for coming birthday
In this first scene leads the way
With a rush of contracts, his day is started
The director's cut is not for the faint hearted
As the camera crew stares and is looking on
The man's life begins to fade until gone

Could his life really be just some movie
Is it really different than it seems to be
The actor has become his latest starring role
As his slippery grip visibly starts to unfold
In desperation, he only want to go home
To his place, his family, and not to be so alone

A nervous breakdown claims this fading star
As his hateful ex-wife struggles with him in his car
No one wants to be his ultimate disparager
They watch dismayed as he cracks into his character
He makes his way to his home in Woodland Hills
But his estranged wife is unreceptive to his tales

Searching for that happy place where he is a father
He mistakenly scares a girl he mistakes for his daughter
In neither sense of world can he make needed connection
But for the life of a movie star, he has no recollection
Deeper and deeper he descends into this sad nightmare
Finding again and again, his life is just not there

Sent to a little nap to rest his overworked brain
The man has clearly snapped under too much strain
Those who know him best find he doesn't know himself
His friend and boss take the script off of a shelf
Trying again to explain where he has strangely slipped
Escaping into the playwright's brilliantly crafted script

It's simpler sort of wished for sort of a deal
Sweeter, happier, but simply not so very real
A world unburdened by this shrieking harpy
But nowhere close to any sense to his living reality
His friend presses on hoping to simply disabuse
Ending the illusion so the actor will no longer confuse

Confuse that which is wished for and that which is
Such is the all to real world of this thing, show biz
Another call and suddenly there is a canceled production
Another tossed away character lost in accountant's deduction
Arthur Curtis is dead, thrown into the round file's can
Except that is in the damaged heart of one very lost man

Learning that his office set is being torn down
Arthur's vapid dismay gives away to his frown
Run, run, anxious to find a way to keep his fantasy
Driving fast to escape what's become torrid reality
He rushes toward what is becoming an empty sound stage
The actor will not find his finish on an unwritten page

Then all to suddenly, fantasy becomes all too real
The wife, the office, the successful business deals
Each present within there in a cognitive reference
There in the actor's desired world of pleasant difference
No one on the set remembers seeing him leave
But, then again, they never did quite believe

The usual way to leave dreary life is in a pine box
But Mr. Curtis finds other ways to pick life's locks
When the has left you little more than a mumble
And real life has left you nothing but its crumbles
There is the highway exit sign reading the Twilight Zone
And so he departs from this real road he no longer owns...

(c) July 3, 2017  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved