The man, to make a living,
had plastered hundreds of faces
upon walls, but there was something about this one
which held him captive. It wasn’t just
the stardom of her name, its siren-call,
but the sheer magnitude
of artifice, its grotesque beacon,
which brought the man back
to the carnivals of his boyhood,
when the radiant symmetry
of illusion and promise
was in startling bloom,
and not yet thinning out
to wither.
(Photo by Brassai)
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