Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Screen Dump 384

The internal disarray has become less troubling, yes? . . .
The storm impends . . .
its wheels out of sync with the Zeitgeist . . .
And you, forking pasta on a flurried afternoon
in late November, chat up kinetic theater
with changelings hiding in Jane Austen's lines . . .
But what of the small dairy-farming communities
whose zigs and zags call less
for explanation than for diagnosis? . . .
Are they fodder for your tweets
or for your unreasonable notebook? . . .
Take for instance the gestural brush strokes
or the old typewriter font with its enigmatic nothingness
catching purchase with casting calls
while a restorer guesses Leonardo . . .
repaints the entire background ivory-black
and raises the bar to $450 million . . .
We await befuddlement . . .
It will come . . . as offshore Evinrudes take turns . . .
I am aghast . . . at something . . .

Leonardo's Salvator Mundi

Friday, November 17, 2017

The New Religion

That culture is becoming "the" culture.
          - Tad Friend, Getting On

You wake to a loopier world and friend request from Big Pharma.
Not unlike the Neanderthal's trephining blades, yes?

The Mom and Pop on the corner is no more a gray flannel suit
with homburg and pipe.

Whatever happened to The Young Philadelphians
shinnying up the senior partner pole slathered with grease?

Survey Says T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y.
Fifty-something "Grampa" Buzz's flip-flopped new boss is young enough

to be his son's son. . . . Grampa Buzz can't afford to get laid
off . . . but he will . . . and his salary will buy five smarter

twenty-something brogrammers unencumbered by stodgy college degrees.
Their expertise's half-life is down to three years.

Who writes code anymore anyway . . .
now that off-the-shelf APIs are ready to do the heavy lifting?

It's all there in the cards.
And just what cards might those be?

Golden Cosmos

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Screen Dump 383

The mark of my poetry is the constant regret that human experience
eludes description.
          - Czesław Miłosz

The insincerity of huge red clown shoes trips up
your lip-sync of David Bowie's Oh You Pretty Things . . .
as foreign tongues dip into bowls of chowder
laid out with candy-ass smiles
and free tickets to movie theaters featuring blank screens
awaiting flash-in-the-pan fictional lives . . .
Bicycling figure-eights between goalposts
with sustain pedal engaged . . .
the buffering . . . the artisanal teas . . .
the Nabokovian butterflies pinned with day
passes to wooded paths strewn with incomplete sentences . . .
It's all shtick, yes? . . .
Wandering lonely as a cloud pits you against bulls
in china shops with intricate archways
spelling out the history of underground go-betweens . . .
You have a knack for note-taking
which bodes well for fine-tooth combing the intricacies
of personal spaces known only to others once removed . . .
You will be called upon . . . I just know it . . .


Monday, November 13, 2017

Screen Dump 382

I'm stuck in a paraphrase . . . your paragraph
a faux antidote . . . capturing moments coalescing
at the bottom of a black hole . . .
Dealmaker or dealbreaker? . . .
The endpoint the same, yes? . . .
I mean when was the last time you considered
the combination of letters headbutting you
as we speak . . . or . . . as we try to communicate
with signage? . . . To dawdle in such dress
as they are used to wear, indeed! . . .
Forget that it's all there . . . all the remnants of your odyssey
when you were given a second chance
to guide the motorcycle through the cones
set out by the Emperor of Ice Cream . . .


Friday, November 10, 2017

Screen Dump 381

Parenthetical interruptions . . . exhausting . . . you try to avoid them
and marvel at the perfection of the opening line:
It's late already, five or five-thirty . . .
You concede that the search for meaning is senseless . . .
a convex mirror type of phenomenon
as jarring as verbal abstraction when playing hangman . . .
What about transitions? . . .
Rarely abrupt . . . and this I guess is good . . .
You have been known to confuse yourself . . . and others . . .
There is some solace, however, in putting on an overcoat
reeking of a story critiqued by oddsmakers . . .
And what does it remind you of? . . .
It may take a while, with all the red tape, but rest assured
it will happen . . . say the informants . . .
most of whom would flounder in a stream of consciousness . . .

Paolo Roversi

Monday, November 6, 2017

Screen Dump 380

Post-coital hot tubbing with mannequins
unleashes half-baked half-overheard conversations plagiarized
from footnotes of wannabes miming cocksure readers
whose bar-hopping is choked
with arms, legs, glass eyes, and false positives . . .
Your intrepid unscripted words continue to trickle into daylight
while your profile gets a fresh coat of paint
and your shopping cart checks itself out . . .
And these are only a few of your favorite things? . . .

Paolo Rovesi