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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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