Understand, I didn’t set out to be the guy who writes the poems for movies: I, like you, wanted to be in the May New Yorker. But you’ll only ever hear my work when the studios need to crap out another picture about a sensitive poet. Can’t go on stealing from Auden forever, I suppose, but it’s quite a shame that when an audience should be feeling something, instead, they’re getting spoon-fed what wouldn’t have made it into my high school literary magazine. For the first few, I attempted, I really did, but learned better. Grief is a dwelling, a massive black house that every studio executive wants to live in. So that’ll be every first line: my grief is a house, or my grief is my childhood home, or my grief is a fucking skyscraper. They write themselves, yet I’ve steady work if Gwynneth Paltrow is co-producing another turd, and if not me, Dave Pelican, who paints for every movie that needs a gallery scene. Every time someone stands in front of the giant canvas in wonder, I hope you’ll consider Dave, hunched on a backlot, some twenty-five year-old knob director asking him to make it a little more colorful or a little more dour. We’ve spent more than a couple nights in the quiet L.A. bars, wondering why we don’t just trade, because I’m more than a little handy with a paintbrush, and he does a mean D.H. Lawrence impression. But we end up in our studio apartments, and he’s painting something suitably sullen and I’m making notes for the next project: grief is a mansion just big enough for Leonardo DiCaprio.