Screen Dump 756

Forget inevitability . . .

Forget the sloop you pinned your hopes on . . .

The deck is stacked but you know that . . .

And veganism? . . . OK, veganism . . .

Recall the chef you went to high school with

deboning your salmon steak

while in an antechamber

a one-nighter riffed on a Fender? . . .

You wanted so much for it to be much ado . . .

There's loneliness in your acceptance, yes? . . .

The time your Skylark wouldn't start

leaving you stranded in nowhereland

only to be dropped off at a subway stop

eyes locked on the third rail

as if onlookers refused the magic

of your harmless costume . . .

And later at the bus stop

where rehearsals got out of hand

and the day became a graphic novel

in a foreign language . . .

You knew this but continued your renderings

rubbing your hands together between your legs as if . . .

As if, what? . . . As if the director would call a rewrite? . . .

Take a moment to close read your journal

then return to the diorama of your neighborhood . . .

Again, forget inevitability . . .

Jan Scholz

Screen Dump 755

You're taking a line for a walk

to capture the cherry blossoms along the River Styx . . .

It's a day in someone's life, yes? . . .

The someone who was promised this but given that . . .

How unlikely . . .

Then there's the excitement of the roles you took on

after the barman's Last Call

bloating your Little Black Book

with fingerprints from your tweens . . .

You were dusted . . . and sent home . . .

Your Hokas make the unseen seen

with canned images from the produce section

of the neighborhood Hannaford . . .

Plans to repair the fence

trampled by wolves in sheeps' clothing

en route to grandma's

await the results of COVID testing . . .

The director of Netflix's Ripley

refuses to believe it . . . or not . . .

There once was a time . . . you suppose . . .

 

Screen Dump 754

You've become enamoured of the invisible,

the mystery of entanglements . . .  

It's not so much the unknown,

it's the excitement

of being seduced by the moment,

the feeling of engagement, a shared journey . . .

The sloop of your dreams, drifting . . .

This performative feeling about writing . . .

that it's not set in stone . . .

that it's not closed down, not done . . . never done . . .

is good! . . .

You wake to an openness . . .

a blank page, an empty canvas . . .

And, no, it's not too late

to resume the close reading of your autofiction . . .

to experience deconstruction . . .

A bookstore materializes long enough

for you to buy your book, which isn't for sale . . .

Someone chimes in with sequencing is arbitrary . . .

Where does that fit in? . . .

Nothing wrong with being inquisitive . . .

Better than being aggressive or defensive, yes? . . .

The slippery slope of misinterpretation? . . .

of misunderstanding? . . .

The time left is now . . .

your experimental film . . . infinitely looped . . .

The Turin Horse (2011)

Screen Dump 753

A  Polaroid of young people at a beach

and the tale of the white Donald Duck tank suit

dripping with the full catastrophe begins . . .

A return to the days of then

soundtracked by 45s

the carefree exchange of goods and services

Jerry's Long Strange Trip . . .

high heels clicking on a 4 AM sidewalk

following an n of 2 or 3 or 4 . . .

all legs and arms and hair and words

streams flooded with binge

when . . . fanfare, please . . . a bread truck

rolls onto the scene

with Henry Miller at the wheel

Can I give you a lift? . . .

so you climb on

for yet another ride

costumes aplenty

experiences aplenty

memories aplenty . . .

Regrets? . . . A few . . . You too? . . .

La-di-da, la-di-da, la, la . . . à la Annie Hall . . .

years later . . . an ice storm cometh . . .

its outage an insult to the Age of Crocs . . .

The world teeters on the edge

of Hawking's uninhabitable . . .

yoked to this and that . . . this and that . . .

and your hand . . . their hand . . . a full house . . .

Antonio Palmerini

30 days . . . 30 poets . . . 30 poems . . .

Rensselaerville Library's Eighth Annual Poem-A-Day Project
celebrates National Poetry Month
with a new poem by a local poet each day for April’s 30 days.
With this year’s entries, PAD will have showcased
240 poems by 136 poets.
Stop by PADYES for your daily poetry fix!

Screen Dump 752

You’re inventorying defining moments, trying to decide which one to include in your proposal for grant money to mount your play which you haven’t begun to write, so you're like, This may be a defining moment, with feet entering the five and dime from your childhood, drawn from a linebook by the director of that over-the-top production where everyone was fitted with a body double to stand in when excitement paled, but now with the defining moment head-butting, you turn to noone and begin improvising a selection of Beckettian anecdotes because, just because, you're in the mood to name-drop . . .

Billie Whitelaw in Samuel Beckett's Footfalls (1984)

Screen Dump 751

This is where the metaphor gets a little screwy

with you playing the part . . . whatever the part may be . . .

knowing that observing the inconspicuous

is your forte . . .

Let's start with an invisible person

sampling poutine at a diner . . .

They leave their cell phone at a bakery

with a baguette and stories to tell . . .

Are they a tourist? . . . Maybe later . . .

Cut to a lump of clay shape-shifting . . .

toggling the fourth wall as if a gift horse's mouth . . .

Are you OK with the vegetables in your garden? . . .

Let your family know . . .

This is important . . .

Family relationships are well worth

their autofictitious melodramas . . .

Think Tolstoy . . .

How this came to this is well worth the time

it took for you to open the door to an unknown sound . . .

A cellist in the woods works through a Bach sarabande . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 750

A draft of a manuscript is being read aloud

by a voice from the air . . .

Crows mock crows . . .

You enter the scene idiosyncratically loose

in bib overalls and Mucks

approaching as if in the middle of a paper spree . . .

An unshapely tuft of something begins . . .

It's all about dreamscapes

in Rothkovian colorways . . .

The mist . . . as written, yes? . . .

but why this consequence by an unknown? . . .

I mean you could have just as easily engaged

with the cameras rolling . . . as discussed . . .

I'm not sure you're ready to apply the rules

of present tense . . . when the color of time being

is finished anyway . . . staying out beyond curfew . . .

of course you remember that day

on the street when the rightful owner

emerged from a late-model SUV

and began interviewing you for the next installment . . .

Federica Putelli

Screen Dump 749

You sport incompletion at an archaeological dig

with Etruscan vases and dental instruments

playing the part with players playing root canals

costumed as shattered visages . . .

The lone and level sands pull out into traffic . . .

You disappear into a labyrinth of words

but manage to recite your way out

with No coward soul is mine by Emily Brontë

whose disregard for convention

makes for an enjoyable trek

across the Yorkshire moors of someone's dreamscape . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 748

You concede a strange bunch of circumstances

abutting a consolation of sorts

nothing to complain about . . . yet

but someone's interior monologue is about to sound . . .

It could be UPS

in the guise of medievalism or innuendo . . .

You're tizzied over an early arrival . . .

Try not to get hammered again . . . there's no need . . .

not that there ever was . . . at least according to the transcript . . .

It could be just what the doctor ordered

not unlike when your development was muted

and you were on your clovenly way . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 747

Your rhyming dictionary is off the grid

cluttered with words

you meant to Uber . . .

Buybackers stream . . . yet another example

of wardrobe anxiety from your out-and-about days

of celebrity passcodes . . .

This will begin . . . and this too will begin . . .

dreamscapes overshadowing your vintage items . . .

Regressing to some well-worn route

leading to a floor-through apartment

filled with the clarity of your mirror image

warms on the back burner . . .

Nothing is ready for you . . .

Nothing will be ready for you . . .

Appointments are backed into double wides . . .

This is not new . . . consolation prizes

leak language barriers . . . a throwback to the days

you shopped for muffled noises

only to be disappointed by more days of exceptions . . .

or expectations, whatever . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump  746

Your costume mishap is a trailer park

and the horses in Patti Smith's

debut studio album are having none of it . . .

eating and drinking their shortlisted lives

in the orchard that went viral

while you studied your reflection

in a glass bead game not unlike Ahab's

he's dead but he beckons . . .

And here comes everybody's electronic music

with Moby whose middle name is Melville . . .

Patti Smith

Screen Dump 745

And now you're cutting and pasting . . .

exiting through the gift shop

with Billie Eilish's What Was I Made For? . . .

An uncertainty about how to live? . . .

A turning like the turning of the seasons? . . .

An image of a face from long ago

but the entanglement is like a train

leaving a station recalled

for a phrase rethought . . .

Enough to cross the bridge

with street cred and sky-high interest rate . . .

Not that you haven't been warned . . .

It's the unremitting arrogance

of a violist da gamba stopping by woods

on a snowy evening quoting from

a remaindered copy of How Should a Person Be? . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 744

The tiresome bobbing and weaving

obliterate the string of pearl days

basking in the unseasonable 50s . . .

What you thought you heard

is what you heard . . . at least

according to hearsay . . .

Emptying a bottle of invisible ink

to the Big Pharma of resolution

floored in the cereal aisle at the supermarket

is an AI monologue composed

not from images but from words . . .

Objections disallowed by dissonance, yes? . . .

How can masterworks survive

in this forensic undercurrent? . . .

A din drifts in from the back room

where pleas are bargained

before headlining virtual tabloids . . .

Your lines riskng enjambment

will doubtless make the six o'clock news . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 743

Lately you've been lapse . . . and why is that? . . .

The intricacies of intimacy

with you elsewhere retooling your philosophy . . .

Nietzsche's We have art so we don't die of reality? . . .

Is that it? . . . OK, I'll play along

with the casual dress code

but now what? . . . now you're complaining

because you're telling me

that complaining kickstarts creating

and isn't that what we're all about? . . .

Like listening to someone's words

as if on the noisy soundstage of a silent film

or listening to a serial open mic reader

whose words supply a different narrative

every time someone texts

or listening to your own words

dress-coded for undertow with boxy takeaway . . .

Illusory, perhaps? . . .

Reupping with the help of an intimacy coach should do it . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 742

Thinking a reshoot of the end game

is one way to pass this late season snowstorm . . .

The hiking paths wait . . .

This pincushiony dynamic is offputting

to say the least . . . it can't help but raise a flag

to the 365 days of summer . . .

It's something to think about, I suppose,

especially when considering footwear

and the miles and lines to be traversed . . .

I hate to remind you but those cyberdays

keep coming back, their moves color-coded

for easy turnstiling . . . and more . . .

Flat screens are a turn on . . .

Reminds me of Miles cranking out however many hits

to fulfill his contract and join Columbia . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 741

You're turning the room inside out

looking for the missing link

you forgot to include in your email . . .

Rhode Island Reds cluck news feeds . . .

the regulated symbol in art

smearing your dreamscape lakeside

with the cinematography grammatical

to showcase your outré demeanor . . .

It's nothing . . . really, this imagining

as if one were willing to retreat

to a safer pop-up monastically . . .

even with everything curated, yes? . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 740

You're collapsing the story . . . but why? . . .

Why this segue into alienation

with voices at the back door? . . .

No, not gallows humor, not just yet . . .

You have come too far to fear the end . . .

of course, it's all about coming

at the drama from a distance

all stops pulled out

the perspective just that

and, what, you're trying to reel it in? . . .

You do recall the reshoot

after several lines had been cut

leaving you at loose ends, yes? . . .

a kind of detachment

even about the most intimate of details

fanning out like a stacked deck of cards

with the magician asking you to pick one . . .

There's more to it, sure, but let's not, not now . . .

Antonio Palmerini

Screen Dump 739

Fat Tuesday kicks off a super bowl of Cajun gumbo . . .

Cybersecurity mavens schedule colonoscopies

with iCloud colorways

as if keyboarding members of the alphabet

to guide a 20-wheeler through the woods of words

would be enough to maintain a daily stepcount of 10,000

for a buy-back from the gods of uncertainty . . .

Repurposing confidential information next to a dogbed

is a bullet train back to the future

where rehearsals are more rehearsals

and the game afoot raises the stakes

to a sub two-hour marathon

fixed on the window of a Magic 8 Ball . . .

The drama resurfaces in water under the bridge

quenching no one's thirst . . . with you

leaving the table of random numbers without a word

without finishing the song . . . driving away

into sheets of sound . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 738

You're riding the shapes of the books you have read . . .

the geometry of stories

etymological underpins

backstories

late night walks - real and imagined . . .

Self-mythologizing life's path or paths

however logical or reverential

may seem, if pressed against a whiteboard,

a mapping of your encounters

etched from bootleg tapes

whose words fill thought bubbles

alphabetizing utterances

from the street, the media, internet feeds . . .

It's not just that though is it? . . .

But what of hopscotching the ongoingness of paradox? . . .

A trifle? . . . the intoxicating trance? . . .

the blindness of happiness? . . . I mean

you seem to be coming into the country of the end game

as it is, or better, as it will be . . . an alternate stage

upon which you can enact or re-enact 

your one wild and  precious  life  . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 737

You're shadowing Kafka . . . with pointe shoes

spinning . . . spiraling . . .

into the tremendous world

inside his head 

then it's on to the drone

with the speed of a grizzly

surrounded by white . . .

but not whose woods these are . . .

the plaintiff continuing despite admonitions

with someone alleging misappropriation . . .

Again, the unbearable lightness

before the conductor

raises her baton to begin

reeling-in the orchestra . . .

letting them know

where she wants them to go . . .

giving the impression

they're behind the beat . . .

But they know . . . yes, they know . . .

not unlike the time you waded into the water . . .

baptismally, perhaps? . . .

quoting Gilgamesh

the unbearable heaviness . . .

the emptiness of the endgame . . . moving . . .

wait, not moving, no longer . . .

A matinee . . . but not . . .

flip it . . . to a rendering of the terrain . . .

Leila Forés

The Ghosts Among Us

Death bench-presses a cosmos of darkness . . .

a friend's wife . . . a poet's partner . . .

The clock smirks . . .

It's not only life's etch-a-sketches

or the diagrammables

in the Kafkaesque cul-de-sac

but more . . .

which will play out . . . regardless . . .

Acknowledging re-acquaintances will buy time . . .

especially now with the truth-or-dare-isms

repotted in the guest room

where someone's once-and-future . . .

once waited . . .

There will be an ungodly number

of happenstances carried aloft

through the streets . . .

white chariots drawn by white horses . . .

The Trojan Horse will appear . . .

weighing history heavily . . .

And in the final moments of the final quarter

extras as ghosts will fly in

to make it all seem real . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 736

Having discarded the template-a-minute app

as an unbearable lightness

confused by impersonators

you engage the drudgery of filling in the slots

while polishing stones from a not-so-hidden cache . . .

Altogether now with meaning, yes? . . .

You're drifting off-course . . .

the day's minutia fogging the lens

to say nothing of wannabes warming up . . .

The little green room is plantless . . .

an amalgam of exchange

without dawn's pristine view

reaching back for a foothold

or facsimile

which in time will revisit this memory . . .

This is not without precedent

but the moment-to-moment displacement

is hard to accept . . . let alone confront . . .

Your call-ins have been duly noted . . . and archived . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 735

As if you're using a prepared piano

to explore the fringe between music and noise . . .

experiencing emotions

as you write about them . . .

Is that something you even think about? . . .

Meaning? . . .

Cavorting with unbearables? . . .

Not sure . . .

but there always seems to be less to go on

especially when films echo the wavelengths of the lost

sitting with ferals napping on stoops . . .

Confronting silence with veiled undertones? . . .

Interpreted as joy? . . .

It's the presence, yes? . . .

That's it . . . the presence . . .

Questioning the call of odysseyites

inserting  pronouns to enhance palatability . . .

But didn't you say you were confused

by the struggle to make it all fit

into a nice little takeaway? . . .

OK, maybe elsewhere . . .

Forget the trends . . . rampant on the boulevards . . .

There's more to it than that . . .

the pounding at the back door, for example,

or the voided wishes of inoccupants in dilapidated storefronts . . .

It's probably worth the bother . . .

besides we all know you enjoy winging it

with the monochromatic subtones of early morning drivebys . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 734

The mesmerization of the airbnb . . . a loophole

to magic your audience into hypnotic submission . . .

scripting the maelstrom of your wiles

with alternative mysteries

leading to the decreation of egocentrics

who are left to wander the empty boulevards

of Walmart Supercenters . . .

Your promiscuity alchemical . . . its weird threads

seducing those on the edge of aftermaths

as if feeding an inner mindscape yet to be embraced . . .

Leila Forés