Keep going . . . with the words, I mean . . .
the paper spree boggling the metric
with autofictions-a-plenty
into the facades of north Jersey . . .
Climbing into back seats
searching for the person you were
or the person you wanted to be
as cameras spoke in foreign tongues
with subtitles thrown in
randomly for effect . . .
Knowing what and how much
challenged the cutting room floor
not unlike two roads
diverging in the yellow wood
with blue lip gloss
for the final scene
cookie cutters and all
while a voice from the back room
chimed in with something
about an Aqua Velva Man . . .
You prided yourself a documentarian
but lost altitude between the lines
tailspinning into the chaos
of single room occupancies . . .
Some of it admittedly easy . . .
And here's Ashbery, for example,
late at night in his small,
unprepossessing study
on the ninth floor
of a rental apartment
on the corner of Ninth Avenue
and 22nd Street in Chelsea
grading his poems A B C . . .
Imagine the synaptic activity . . .
Code breakers as oddsmakers
striking poses in stretch limos
called in when the air
was sucked out
and stand-ins began carrying on
about staying after school
for makeup tests making out in cubbies
to that summer's theme escaping
in colorful hot air balloons . . .
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| Felicity Jones in The Aeronauts (2019) |