iBlue*

Never trust alabaster cockatoos
or blue-light specials . . .

Answering the door
with blueberry muffin on your face . . .

At least in your electra glide in blue eyes . . .

You highlight . . . the (pen)ultimatum . . .
in red yellow blue . . .

Memories flood the five minutes . . .
both of you blue-penciling the script . . .

Whatever it is . . . will be massaged . . .
like the donor's heart . . .
to answer the questions that have been airdropped
and to be corrected analyzed blue-penciled
and returned . . . for revision . . . later . . . in the month . . .

Bob Dylan's North Country Blues . . .

You have become true north . . . again . . .
Gerrymandering the neighborhood . . . in provocative teamwear . . .
Usernames on the back in iridescent blue . . .

I've got Blue Light Specials on the brain . . .

Your dreams of curating an exhibit of shopping carts
ooze seduction . . .
an overdosing on blue pigment . . .

Life deserves an essay question . . .
An essay question . . . with extra time
and additional blue books . . .

My dreams paralyzed . . .
demanding answers to questions
orphaned in blue books . . . long ago . . .

Miles' Blue In Green jostling for attention
alongside your students
omniscient . . . indifferent . . . whatever . . .
shepherded into the bipolarity of adulthood . . .

Quibbling over the blueness of blue
and how over time most bow to convention . . .

Your costume as rhetorical fiction . . . as illicit . . .
as maddeningly blue . . .
where in earlier chapters, you fell in love
with retraction . . .
taking back what you offered . . . teasing . . .
as you considered the fast lane in a trailer park . . .
with rules for engagement for understudies
afflicted with acyanoblepsia . . .
the inability to see blue . . .

. . . insinuating yourself into the after-hours . . .
asking recording engineers . . . session musicians . . .
character actors . . .
about the nuances . . . and blueness
of your voice . . .

Finding that most people's favorite painting
is a blue landscape . . .

with Miles . . . in an atelier . . . noodling . . .
Kind of Blue . . . a mantra . . .

As when you look back and get drenched in blue . . .

You're on record for covers
for begin-agains
for setting up a kiosk in a trailer park
outside of Atlantic City . . .
and you have been written up
for quilting your odyssey . . .
complete with blue lights, dampeners, and
(un)dressers . . .

The declensions . . . the alterations . . .
Insidious, but then . . .
demythologizing the odyssey . . .
à la Maggie Nelson in Bluets:
[It] worked well because he is a passive top
and I am an active bottom . . .

And Sherlock Holmes's Blue Carbuncle . . .

You kick it up a notch for the blue screeners . . .
a bevy of iconoclasts in a blue Chevy SUV . . .

While you're up, could you please flip
the complications . . . of that encounter . . .
when the reds, whites, and blues partied hard? . . .

There's a blueness to it . . . hypnotic . . .
despite the trepidation of icosahedrons . . .

You were kept up at night by Joan Mitchell's
Les Bluets . . .

Gym rats crowd onto a blue continuum with feigned defeat
pained by the thought of your strange repetitions . . .
their ineptitude straining the windows with halftime images . . .

You enter the fray
disabling the tried and true
with the words of oglers
vying for redacting . . . and blueness . . . again . . .

You certainly had your share
of forgotten moments . . .
when out of the blue you received applications
for the position you had yet to advertise . . .

This morning at the breakfast table . . .
your blue eyes mapped your next strategem . . .
imagining blue skies . . . and blue waters . . .
a blue room . . . in a blue hotel . . . as if like Stein
you believe every bit of blue is precocious . . .

*composed for a blue-themed open mic by appropriating lines with
blue from Screen Dump 1-365.

Diandra Forrest

Disconnecting the Dots

Sometimes I left messages in the street.
          - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress

And then Frank O'Hara stopped by.
He's living in a yurt . . . in the 'Dacks
doing this . . . doing that
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
And how about Gustav Mahler channeling Frank O'Hara . . .
bicycling Bavaria
I seem to be absolutely born for the cycle!
deconstructing Moby's Porcelain
disconnecting the dots
as if it matters . . . and it does . . . but not to
his gorgeous, alcoholic, hearing-impaired,
superflirty, 19 years his junior, wife and muse, Alma,
whose bedpost is mottled
with the notches of affairs.
Billed as the most beautiful girl in Vienna
she believes several men are better than one
and spills as much to Freud one afternoon on his couch.
Never a fan of her husband's music
she chooses none of his for her funeral 50 years after his death.
And here again is Frank:
It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, . . .

Laura Mentink in Wittgenstein's Mistress (2017)

Early this morning, bicycling Route 28 to Inlet:
unforgettable . . .
meandering past pristine lakes, deep woods,
and rustic little towns, someone wrote.
I know a moose when I see one.
And I've seen several . . . at Hoss's General Store in Long Lake.
Everything anyone would need . . . or want.
Everything.
Books . . . some read, some unread . . . on my shelves.
OK, so I've skipped a few chapters
and skimmed others
and disregarded enjambments.
Who hasn't?
But really . . . what is this thing called PO-ET-RY?
Without coffee, I mean . . . or, I mean, of course.
And what's with that?
Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends:
A photograph's all that's left of you.
Must we write from prompts?
Or from furniture music, à la Satie?
I am now trying . . . to write upon nothing, Swift said.
Someone keeps elbowing in with irregardless.
Where, oh where, are the grammar police?
Can you spell donuts?
How about potato?
How about VP Quayle's version of potato?
By the way, it's now called Dunkin'.
Dunkirk is showing at Bow Tie Cinema.
Try this . . . but not at home.
This is a text.
I'm embedding pics in a text.
Putting pen to paper . . . sitting on the fence.
Trying to write right
and other absurdities for understudy
by standins . . . and passersby . . . and wannabes
saddled with odysseys.
Three rows over, 60 years ago, in Latin Class
this girl - an upperclassman - in the school uniform
and I'm mentally undressing her
while Julius Caesar divides Gaul into three parts.

Latin Class

Coming Into the Country with John McPhee
who memorialized big rigs and other uncommon carriers
in Uncommon Carriers
after shadowing truckers for a few months.
Something about momentum
and air brakes
and commercial breaks
which speed delusions
with Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man.
I'm out here waiting for the answer with Soren Kierkegaard
the other Dane who loved the rain falling mainly on the plain
in full view of Either/Or
written after breaking up with his fiancée Regine Olsen
using the pseudonyms A for Either, B for Or,
and Johannes Climacus for The Diary of the Seducer.
I can well understand why children love sand, Wittgenstein said.
It's all about castles . . . my home is my castle, yes?
With you bundled with apps . . . one day in the foreseeable . . .
An algorithm walks into a bar . . .
This too will be tweaked . . . and tweeted . . .
to fit the model to the facts
or the facts to the model . . . whichever . . .
before Cicero's Third Oration:
How long, O Catiline, will you tax our endurance?
How long will that madness of yours escape us?
To what end will your unruly boldness hurl itself at us?

Lucius Sergius Catilina

Sound familiar?
This, by the way, is an example of trichotomy,

in full habit Sister Anna Roberta said.

And why the Fates red-carded Caesar
in the middle of the Rubicon
and why Hannibal joined the circus and mastered elephantese.
It comes full circle . . . all of it . . .
the dots connected . . . disconnected . . . fading from view . . .
with paybacks and fallbacks playbacks and callbacks wetbacks and drybacks
and boxes of ephemera
near the counter of the old, lamented
Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston,
Dan Chaisson wrote in The New Yorker
brimmed with
mangy postcards
wedding announcements
lobby cards
vinyl LPs
hippie stickers and patches
Civil Defense pamphlets and evacuation maps
poker chips
Old Maid decks
and skinny dogeared self-published PO-ET-RY chapbooks
filled with messages in the street.

Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop

Buttdialing Ubers and Other Sonnetized Shorts

Season Twenty

Using topspin to unseat the poem du jour
carrying most through enjambed memories
with summer . . . bending into grains of sand
primed to mimic phishers
You have yet to read into eccentricity
especially as your odyssey'd past
inheres in material traces
Never forget the soirees . . . in the dunes
with their distinct impressions of nothing
costumed as commitment
as well as someone's . . . Godot's perhaps? . . . footfalls
Everyone was naughty
Everyone regressed
Everyone failed . . . again

Francesco Carrozzini

Buttdialing Ubers and Other Sonnetized Shorts

Season Nineteen

You seem to enjoy the almostness of your borderline personality
carrying on about the leaks in emptiness
that accompany Bruegger's Everything Bagel
and the duffel bags . . . of risky narcissists
adorned with fidgety flight tags
from the Bucket's 100 Places to Visit Before Passing
Stay the merriment became your duly-noted mantra
even after your breaths exceeded the numbers
and you hop-scotched with bouquets of trillium
that happened by on their way
to yet another ho-hum commercial break
that . . . despite the menagerie . . . always made you chuckle . . .
especially when Facebook friends pointed to lapses in serving styles
And you do believe yourself, yes?

Bruno Aveillan

It's August, and the Ponies are Running

(reposted from Monday, August 1, 2011 & Monday, August 1, 2016)

It's August, and the ponies are running:

they're running, running, running;
running away with my better judgment,
my better half, my worse half, my other half;
they're running away with my vacation, my vocation;
with my kids' education, my salutation, my edification;

they're running away with the plump-lipped waitress
in her too-tight uniform, in her too-short uniform,
in her tu-tu uniform;
they're running away with the short-order cook,
the dishwasher, the window washer, the windshield washer,
the loud customers, the cleavagers, the spin doctors.

It's August, and the ponies are running away
with my expectations, my aspirations, my inclinations;
with my best intentions, my worst nightmares;
with the free tees and handicappers,
with the gamblers, the scramblers, the midnight ramblers;

they're running away with the long shots,
the long run, the long ball, the long haul, the big fall;
with the potheads, the potholes,
the hotties with their rubberneckers,
the one-armed bandits and double-deckers,
the card sharks, the loan sharks, the great white sharks;
with the stacked decks and pole vaulters,
the pole sitters and baby sitters;

The ponies are running away with the weary travelers,
the thirst quenchers, the road crew bosses
and time-and-a-halfers;
with the running-on-empties, and pies-in-the-sky,
with the local history buffs and their jaundiced eye;

they're running away with the landscape,
the cityscape, the seascape, the escapees, the APBs;
the trees lining the tertiaries, the estuaries,
the innocent bystanders, the indigents,
the passersby, the groupies, the roadies, the loners;
with the home-schooled and home-brewed;
they're running away with the motley-crewed.

It's August, and the ponies are running:

they're running, running, running;
running away with the one-tricks, the two cents,
the three blind mice, the four horsemen;
with the squanderers, the wanderers
the hangers-on, the barflies, the right wingers,
the left wingers, the middle-of-the-roaders, the Debra Wingers;
with the know-it-alls and straight shooters,
the forked tonguers, the mixers and remixers, the mixmasters.

It's August, and the ponies are running:

they're running, running, running;
running away with my severance pay, my brand new day,
my May day, my getaway, my AOK, my here-to-stay,
my hip hip hooray, my final say.

IT'S AUGUST, AND THE PONIES ARE RUNNING!