Screen Dump 588

Time speeds through you . . . bidirectionally . . .

The ceiling fan spins tales of inundation . . .

How emulators seek justification

for hoarding . . .

The need to hold onto some semblance

of your past waking life

in all its preciousness . . .

The get-gos are gone . . . and will not be back

anytime soon . . . if at all . . .

There was a time and place

for some of us

but the clocks changed

so the players anteed-up

thinking they'd return and decide what to do

as if their lives were haikus without seasons . . .

Lydia Roberts

Screen Dump 587

Then they asked about directing solo performances

the credibility of misplaced modifiers

whether it was more difficult than directing a group of actors

and you knee-jerked

manipulating the interior monologue

for all to see

words and images bailing

arms raised . . . as if opening the book to the moment

the stage suddenly overrun with excerpts from

Didion's Book of Common Prayer . . .

But it's not really that, is it? . . .

What do you mean? . . .

You know . . . the commonplace we all inspire

when tackled mid-run

the instant replays . . . in slo-mo

buckets brought out as if this had been written

the well-intentioned escaping in their high-end SUVs . . .

You reopen to the dilemma of desire

your crib notes wrinkled by the winters of our discontent

featuring quick-study shadowers

who bronze footnotes of hidden agendas

that by force and against their will you made them eat . . .

The truth grieves me . . .

It grieves us all . . .

despite the rules against showing pain . . .

The seduction of the arrival gets their goat

and they more often than not collapse into the fourth wall . . .

Directing solo performances? . . .

Of course, proceed with an enigma dried to perfection

showcased against the missing . . .

Meg Sullivan in MegAnneMaud (2009)

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Your early old age enters the Land of Foreign Bodies

where quick-to-ensnare logicians emeriti map rescue distances

always rescue distances . . .

It's not something for the pulchritudinous

who would insist otherwise with their twittered tattoos . . .

The community idiom is at the top of someone's list

of inappropriate pours . . . on-site distractions

glance-thieves all . . .

I am beside herself, yes? . . .

The Real Deal has been kicked up several notches . . .

As requested, I too have submitted my request

to the shadow boxers on Main

running in place with ankle weights

ramped-up with ebikes . . . their relentless

pursuit of dotted lines almost says it all

but without the missing pieces the end-all totters . . .

Why the snaps of an empty room? . . .

You must know he/she in solo garb meant well . . . I suppose . . .

The waters beyond the Great Barrier Reef

with its 14 degrees of latitude

continue to trump our six degrees of separation, yes? . . .

C-3PO

Screen Dump 585

But the hands are a dead giveaway . . . then too the drama of the face . . .

The moments of anticipation . . . excitement . . . inklings

into the perhaps . . . retooling yourself for elsewhere

as if the curtain call had been recalled

and you boarded the ship of happenstance . . .

Meanwhile upticks in loss continue . . . increase . . .

There will be no retake . . . no remake . . . you disembarked at that point

and set out . . . this and not this . . . that . . . etcetera . . .

Anka Zhuravleva

Screen Dump 584

Downward and downward

as if a prayer for words that holds open the door

to a dreamscape with you in an orange grove above the sea

and once a mountain covered in snow . . .

You found comfort at the entrance to a covered bridge . . .

Odysseyites provide blankets . . . at times a postcard . . .

Each day the stone steps of the climb

to a hillside town with costumed go-betweens

reciting lines long lost carry you . . .

I would have preferred collecting paper cuts

but you insisted . . . then everything changed and we were left

with a set of hieroglyphs for reassembling life

suited to the colorways that were chosen

by drivebys on their way out with diminishing returns . . .

Alina Lebedeva