DETECTIVE PROJECTIONIST

A canister of film washes ashore
in the Sun, off the coast of the peninsula,
of the Sun, irremediably thick with algae.

Let’s agree this film is called Florida,
1983. In this film, your best friend
has white, perpetually-barefoot, hair

whereas, before, your friends had names
like Nick, Nicky, last names like Nunciforo
names rife with racketeering connotations.

Your new best friend will teach you how to fish,
to scale fish, to handle a paddleboat, to string
up a floater, to unhook a bass without impaling

Your beer. Sadly, funding for Florida, 1983,
will run out shortly after development, shortly after
a junket tour of investors gets inhaled by Haitian Ghosts.

During the interim, one of the producers will have a coronary
shortly after convincing the mistress of the Cinematographer
to pick up and plop down more than 1,000 miles away.

While the project is sidelined, the real Florida will encounter
hordes of miscreant immigrants, paramilitary pyramid schemers
and masochistic, coke-head, bank slalomers laundering proceeds.

One of the writers at the studio will spring clean across
a dusty copy of a slim volume of poems by that poet that
shogun of imagination, that intrepid interloper, bastard.

And that writer will play tennis with a short, bald executive
that will one day wield some real green-light power,
and is just beginning to stretch out the knuckles

of his talons, and they will get their green light to induce
the budgetary Dobermans to relent, release, and renegotiate
any and all terms relating to Asian & European Distribution.

The marketing harpies will descend on Florida, 1983 as soon
as Basil Edgar Thomas is cast in the role of the narrator; and,
Shiraz Jones will follow suit as the taciturn, eager father.