Busby. Berkeley. Ginger. Rogers.

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

-Winston Churchill, Rochester, New York, 1941

ruby keeler hot cha
dick powell you lucky ducky
swinging to warren and dubin
all the way to paradise
these times will never come again
these nights are so of the sweet and true
not a spaceship in the sky
waterfalls of women
champagne in the limo before
bowie ever sang it
blondell the smart cracker
una merkel smirks and swells
but the gods of all time
love ginger

busby dreamed in a bathtub
the actual fucking warner brothers paid the bills
’cause they made two point five mills
off two fifty K
two hundred beauties
willing and able
a critical cable from dream
six hundred inner thighs
and bouncing bottoms down stairs
no one will ever be the same
especially me

but wait
midway down the parade of footlights
and past HER omg
the sweep down the bar skips a drunken sailor
that frame-by-frame reveals himself someone
and stops everything:
take them all every one of busby’s faces
and draw their lives out in terrible detail
black and white bathrooms and stuttering deaths
malicious and vicious and lonely and loving
baby rose marie sings like she knows it toooooooo well
because in nineteen hundred and thirty three
it hasn’t happened yet
but it will
and still
all the gods
love ginger.

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