In the boys’ room at San Beda College one February
in the late Fifties, I heard and sobbed over a urinal:
a plane had crashed in Iowa, and Buddy Holly
and the Crickets were gone, along with La Bamba.
The music died, we were to sing years later.

In Westwood, Los Angeles, some decades after,
I pored over a map coming out of the UCLA campus,
steered myself across Wilshire Blvd. and some blocks
to a ritzy graveyard with a few celebrities six feet
under. One was Natalie Wood whom I had loved.

Kicked away the single red rose offered daily,
it was said, by the widower Robert Wagner.
Never did like him, he was too thin-lipped
I thought, just as I despised Bobby Darin
for stealing Sandra Dee away, and Alain Delon

for deflowering, imaginably, my princess
Romy Schneider. They were nasty men
who should have gone earlier, not Jimmy Dean
on his Porsche in California, or Elvis in bed
with a banana and peanut butter sandwich.

Why, Sal Mineo kept dying in movies, kept
getting shot in the gut. Frankie The Voice, too,
ravaged by Ernest Borgnine in From Here To Eternity,
for which the future lovable Marty paid the price
in a dark Honolulu alley after a knifefight

with amateur boxer Monty Clift, who in reality
was gay like Rock Hudson, or so we were told,
and must have perished from AIDS himself,
though he died long ago and killed us, too,
when he sat and spoke on a witness stand

in Judgment At Nuremberg. Kim Novak danced
by a lake in Picnic, cat eyes feeling up William
Holden, whose demise in Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing
caused cheongsam-ed Jennifer Jones to drop an ink
bottle. Anyway, Kim’s career died early, too, earlier than

Princess Grace down a winding road in her own kingdom,
at her own daughter’s hand. Then Princess Diana
reprised the role, but in a tunnel in Paris, same continent,
different locations, locations. While Batman lives on.
And James Bond. And we’ll never know the location

of differences, differences between celluloid and cellular,
or the cellophane curtain between screen deaths and
real ones like Bruce Lee’s in the dragon’s very womb.
Today cellphones tell us and we pass it on, so-and-so
or such-and-such just left us bereaved, and oh how

(so we think) we knew him or her so very, very well.