The screen is a narrow door, yet he occupies the frame
not as a guest, but as the gravity that holds the room.
There is a specific geometry to the small—
a low center of mass, a kinetic blur of hands,
the gravel-grind of a voice that sounds like
Jersey asphalt and velvet curtains.
He is the patron saint of the jagged edge,
the Penguin’s umbrella dripping with cold ink,
the man who crawled, birth-slick and unashamed,
from the leather skin of a couch—
a subversion of the Hollywood gloss
, reminding us that the soul is often loud,
often sweaty, and always hungry.
There is no distance between the myth and the man;
he is the bridge built of comic timing and grit.
In the modern stanza, he is the "volta"—the sudden turn
where the slapstick breaks into a bruised, human smile.
A titan measured not in inches, but in the shadow he casts
across the footlights, dark, round, and unmistakably whole
