Monday, March 29, 2021

Screen Dump 557

The problem is not the linebreaks . . .
The problem is the testimonies that are about to begin . . .
Odysseyites wait for words
from a drone streaming hilltowns
covered with backstories . . .
You return to the library's 800 stacks
and experience a momentary lapse . . . relapse? . . .
Why the break in continuity as if a dead zone? . . .
Redundancy resurfaces with flashbacks
of spring afternoons when you tried 
to let your fingers do the walking with études
on the Bösendorfer
in your piano teacher's front room . . .
There was an allotment of sorts
the otherworldlyness of Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert
the innocence of a walk on a tightrope . . .



Saturday, March 27, 2021

Screen Dump 556

Low-keying the doggerel day with indie riders
made-for-TV floaters
notwithstanding nothing
you chat up the circumstances . . .
Costumes tell stories . . .
You stopgap disengagement
with eyes on the guise
as if by happenstance a reshuffling . . .
words guaranteed to trigger images
or your money back, yes? . . .

Ruth Bell


 

Friday, March 26, 2021

Screen Dump 555

Then I went off to fight some battle
That I'd invented inside my head
          - Sting, Fortress Around Your Heart

You tongue the moon . . . and revisit the porcelain day
when you did nothing . . . could do nothing . . .
but move forward into a maelstrom . . .
the initial fascination stripped
compressing the algorithm
which bumbled along
with Wiz Khalifa's Black and Yellow:
Everything I do I do it big . . .
Indeed . . . the door opening to a windowless room
on the other side of the Williamsburg Bridge
soundtracked by Sonny's tenor . . .
You tried to cut the verb free
but you remained Faustian below the surface . . .
a green glow as if from a disemboweled tanker
which began life in the name of the father
as part of a re-enactment in a hotel room
accoutered with sparkling cityscapes . . .
You counted ripples from swim fins in the East River
but managed to enjoy most of the close encounter
ears stuffed with cotton à la Tarantino
as if under the ruins of a walled city . . .
You spent the afternoon riding the L train
rehearsing your lines in French
to embellish the mystery of the audition . . .

Jan Scholz



Saturday, March 20, 2021

 Screen Dump 554

You skip the review class on Skunk Hour
move into a yurt in the Adirondacks
and assail the seasons
with a hulking ribbonless Remington . . .
The days of wine and roses jacknife . . .
Note-taking turns illegitimate
so you make up what you think
the fourth wall wants to say . . .
It's all about The Art of Losing . . .
losing yourself again in a mirror
losing yourself again in a house of mirrors
listening to her voice echo
through the barbaric frat house . . .
the privileged unhinged . . .
The House of Crazy welcomes us . . .
welcomes overcorrection
where menu options are grayed out
but little matter for the unstoppable
who are seldom stopped . . .
The watchers at the gate continue to look the other way
as Jung's collective unconscious vacations
between the lines of this poem . . .
Try not to let it all bother you? . . .
A judge will be the judge of that . . .
given a script and asked to assume the position
of elementary my dear Watson . . .

Jarek Kubicki


Friday, March 19, 2021

 Screen Dump 553

But what of the depressive realism of social scientists
suggesting that depressed people see the world more clearly? . . .
The dunes hustle geometry
vacillating between high and low
overthinking the moment instead of living in it
as if claustrophobically trapped inside yourself . . .
Again, Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes . . .
You have come to enjoy the space between thinking and doing . . .
The odyssey . . . once exciting now cacophonous . . .
trains and boats and planes
opening to the carefully choreographed . . .
Your notes . . . illegible . . . but you knew that . . .
You blew them off
and Facebooked the afternoon
trying to control the center of the board
lip-syncing Benjamin Clementine's nemesis
after binging The Morning Show . . .
March on
March on
It's complicated . . . or it's too complicated these days . . .
You're bogged down to a near standstill . . .
critics arm wrestling odysseyites
go-betweens taking notes . . . their faces a rictus of joy
continuing to take notes because they have nothing else to do . . .
March on
March on







Saturday, March 13, 2021

Screen Dump 552

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opens with a re-do
of the last scene in The Last Picture Show . . .
the story-within-a-story
about your own Paris, Texas in upstate New York
the unreliable narrator spinning Canterbury Tales
from the looms of Mohawk
with a walk among the clouds
after a Saturday afternoon 25-cent
creature double feature in all three theaters
Mohawk . . . Tryon . . . Rialto
a head-on crash course for clubbing
with inside-outs mimicking trailers
from Alt Cin 516's
visual texture and brooding menace assignment
due Monday . . .
The Creature From the Black Lagoon
teases Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents
bemoaning the convenience therein
for backseat drivers into and out of the City
excepting those staying after for extra credit . . .
the morning after coffee
from the corner Dunkin'
comparing notes and how-to's
using the Law of Small Numbers
to randomize call-backs . . .
The fun-filled auditions were indeed fun-filled
yet when the real runway called
you ran away with your Regents Review 2.0
mouthed the words that fell out
and tried to adapt to Ivy Leaguers . . .
the groves of academe morphing into the graves
with a segue to a second tour in Viet Nam
taking a shrapnel while on reconnaissance 
dying 35 years later at 57 without a memory of a parade
because there were none . . .



Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Screen Dump 551

Everyone's desperate for a foothold in this huge, wild conversation.
          - Alena Smith, showrunner, Apple TV+'s Dickinson

You enjoy a kind of invisibility as if you had never existed . . .
a stand-in for the person-of-disinterest
an Emily Dickinson shadowing Lady Madonna
legitimizing your essential strangeness by respecting boundaries . . .
Outside your bedroom window agoraphobes
pitch headstone rubbings capturing
what had once maybe slipped through the cracks . . .
A transformational grammar for pilgrims, yes? . . .
Odysseyites shelve quips in the cereal aisle at the supermarket . . .
eyeballing masked auditioners wielding shopping carts
with the naiveté of neighborhood know-it-alls . . .
Recognizable voiceovers nix invitations to the dance . . .
the sun wakes to discarded dance cards written up as nuance
an opening to squeeze through whenever
with your doctored script for next season's miniseries . . .
ideas appropriated from unreliable narrators . . .
Return to the photograph of the wedding party . . .
The rehearsal was an empty place setting . . . more or less . . .
 


Monday, March 8, 2021

Screen Dump 550

Produce carts drive the day . . . in streets painted over
with matte Rothkovian black on grey
and someone somewhere with Ticonderoga #2s
etch-a-sketching their way through a biopic
streaming on Netflix for I'm not sure what
jots notes to be archived and auctioned off . . .
You appear pocketed wearing Palladiums
insisting on retracing the backstory
which held promise for temps forecast in the 50s . . .
Indeed, spring is springing . . .
Renewal advances with drum and bugle
while odysseyites toes spooning mud enter with arms waving
as if fist-bumping butterflies flown in for the shoot . . .



Saturday, March 6, 2021

Schiele's Ghost

After he died from the Spanish flu in 1918 at age 28, the ghost of artist Egon Schiele, whose painting "Houses With Colorful Laundry (Suburb II)" sold at Sotheby's London in 2011 for $40 million, moved into my neighbor’s pigeon coop. The pigeons were racing homers. My neighbor would let them out every day to exercise. They would fly in circles above the neighborhood. Schiele would sometimes help. On race days my neighbor and Schiele would transport the pigeons to the starting location, release them, drive back home, and wait for them to return. When a pigeon returned, my neighbor would remove a band from its leg and insert it into a time clock. Finishing times would be recorded and compared to determine the winner. The pigeon coop had a coal stove. Schiele would warm his hands over it. I liked to dribble spit onto the surface and watch it bounce around. This would annoy Schiele. Schiele lived on blueberry pop tarts and Austrian sausages. He spent most of his time drawing female nudes. A book I looked at in the library said that Schiele's art was noted for its intensity and raw sexuality. That was good enough for me. I liked Schiele’s nudes. So did my neighbor. Schiele gave my neighbor one of his drawings in return for rent. My neighbor said that Schiele could stay in the coop for as long as he liked. My neighbor's wife didn't like Schiele. She said he was not welcome in the house. She wasn't happy about him living in the coop but tolerated it because of her husband. She said Schiele's drawings were disgusting. They were the work of the devil. I would visit Schiele most days after school and on weekends. He was usually happy to see me. He would say "Welcome to my studio." He didn't refer to it as a coop or loft. He called it a studio. He would offer me some leftover blueberry pop tarts and Austrian sausage. We would chat for a bit but not for long because it was hard to hear one another over the cooing of the pigeons. Then he would get back to drawing naked women. I would keep one eye on the naked women and the other on the lookout for my mother who didn't like me visiting Schiele. Like my neighbor's wife my mother didn't like Schiele either. She too thought his drawings were disgusting. She said that if I looked at Schiele's naked women drawings I would go blind. That didn't stop me. Schiele loved magic markers. He had tons of them in all colors. He would use them to draw the naked women. He would draw on a drafting table, on top of his small refrigerator, on a shelf, on the floor. He would sometimes climb onto the roof of the coop and draw there. He usually drew from memory but would occasionally bring a woman into the coop. When he did he would say that he had to concentrate, and politely ask me to leave. He once invited three women into the coop. It got really crowded. The pigeons got really excited. They got really loud. My neighbor came out of his house and knocked on the door of the coop. He said something to Schiele. The women left. That was the end of Schiele's life studies. After that he drew only from memory. A few weeks later a circus came to town. Schiele became smitten with the bearded strong woman. He drew her day and night. He was fascinated by her triceps and calves, her facial hair styled in a Van Dyke, and her baritone voice. He loved to watch her "pick things up and put them down." Schiele joined the circus and left town. After my neighbor died, his widow got rid of the pigeons and paid me fifty bucks to knock down the coop.

Egon Schiele


Wednesday, March 3, 2021

 Screen Dump 549

Serialization began in Anderson and Heap's The Little Review
on the Quaker Weaver's dime . . .
A good day? . . . two sentences . . . woo-hoo! . . .
Within reach . . . or so it seemed . . .
bespoked flatware for HCE . . .
digress to the window shade that nearly did Trismegistus in . . .
Imagining Emily's frigate . . . and then some . . .
Hi from brother's brother in the weight room . . . waiting . . .
translated from the short-short The Night Of . . .
then, on to today's virtual with open to
as images of reps of what might have been flood the gym
leaving odysseyites stranded in the stacks at Barnes & Noble
paging through How To's as if words could rewrite history or his story
deflected because Anna Plura
espied a tête-à-tête among the free weights . . .

Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby & Widow Wadman


Tuesday, March 2, 2021

 Screen Dump 548

The rendering captured the rift quite compellingly . . .
No one was being promoted
on the breakers at all hours hoping
for a green light
from the series of quarantine streaming on Amazon Prime . . .
Stop with the punctuation already . . .
Take a moment to paint by numbers . . .
Making progress despite the animosity
in the shredded documents . . .
How did you know? . . .
Was it that apparent from the color-coded Venn diagrams? . . .
What about that time you followed the green footprints
painted on the floor and were forced into a toll booth
strip-searched and released into a short circuit
upsetting the cart comparing apples and oranges . . .
Or those moments in time when foreplay was unnecessary
yet desirable despite being blue-penciled
and stuffed into marble composition tablets . . .

Jarek Kubicki


Monday, March 1, 2021

 Screen Dump 547

It didn't matter . . . the shifting of your tectonic plates
leading to a blind alley with a blind singer with a menu . . .
There once was a crooked cat
but she skipped Chapter Three
and held out for more . . .
as if walking through a wall and resurfacing
with the closing credits . . .
I was happy not to be there although I didn't know it
with the outage and all . . .
It's not unlike anything else . . .
trying to fit into the costumes dictated by a half-eaten script
just enough dialogue I suppose . . .
You were able back then . . . but now with the wearing away
it's doubtful that the resumption will be approved
by the self-appointed trigger-happy usurpationists
with their philosophy of blah posting remarks made in haste . . .

Jarek Kubiki