drivebys

Suppose I were to begin by saying

poetry is aural sex.

That poetry is my erotic other.

Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession.

That it began slowly.

As a curiosity.

An appreciation.

Then, one day, it became more.

A captivation.

A seduction. 

That I had been seduced by the sound of words,

by the sounds words make when they engage.

~

OK, but what is poetry?

~

Poetry is words.

Every word weighs.

~

Words trigger images.

~

thoughts > ideas > words > images > poems

~

. . . but it’s much more, says Patti Smith.

~

Can anyone die without even a little bit of poetry?, asks Mark Strand.

~

I do this I do that, quotes Frank O’Hara

~

Say what? . . . LANGUAGE . . . is a tool,

an organic, untrustworthy, limited system of symbols

for communicating ideas.

~

The question, says looking glass Alice,

is whether you can make words mean so many different things. 

~

It is impossible to speak in such a way

that you cannot be misunderstood. - Karl Popper

~

It’s 1818, a dreary wintry Saturday afternoon. Horace Smith, banker, travels roughly 30 miles from London to Marlow to visit his friend, Percy Shelley, a mere boy with snub nose, spindly six-feet, and wild hair which he ducks in a pail of water from time to time for as he says the freshness of it. His wife, Mary, a wild-eyed young redhead, reads Tacitus for hours. Her novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, is at the printer’s. The three talk pharaohs, and the grandest pharaoh of them all, Rameses II, who had a 57-foot statue of himself erected at Thebes inscribed with his name User-ma-Ra which the Greek historian Hekataios made a hash of, changing it to Ozymandias. The full inscription read King of Kings User-ma-Ra am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let them outdo my deeds. Smith and Shelley decide to have some fun and write sonnets about the toppled monument which is all that remains of Rameses II’s greatness. Smith titles his On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below. Shelley calls his Ozymandias. In 10 minutes flat, or thereabouts, he composed one of the greatest poems of all time.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

~

Here’s Rilke, across the ages:

Dear darkening ground,

Just give me a little more time.

I just need a little more time, . . .

~

I use the metaphor of a hotel to show that the house of poetry is huge, with rooms for all types of poets and all flavors of poems.

~

The poetry hotel was opened in the 1800s

by Walt (Whitman) and Emily (Dickinson).

~

July 4th, 1855. A lonely 36-year-old closeted homosexual from a family of misfits, a printer, an editor, a sometimes teacher who hates teaching, loves opera, oratory, the streets, the rivers, bohemianism, reads widely but indiscriminately, an inveterate scribbler, note-taker, self-promoter, huge ego, reinvents himself in a poem, becomes the poem, concussively confident, gutsy, enthusiastically high on life, a kosmos, embracing everyone and everything, celebrating everyone and everything, inventing a distinctly new art showcasing a presumptive “I” and an  assumptive “you,” unshackling the line, the rhyme, the rhythm; its utter wildness changing the course of world literature; embodying the ideals, attributes, subjects, and speech of his native land, America; foreshadowing Allen Ginsberg’s century-later pronouncement of spontaneous and fearless first thought best thought: his 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass is by far the best of all nine; later versions suffer bloat, hamstrung by self-indulgence and overwork; Leaves flips poetry on its head, turns it upside-down, becomes the Holy Grail before which other poets prostrate themselves.

~

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd.

- Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

~

I am haunted by her presence. I am haunted by her words. Her intensity. Her genius. Who was this woman? This otherworldly being? This strange, witty, gifted, little redhead with hazel eyes and a contralto voice who, almost singlehandedly, revolutionized poetry and the language of poetry from her white-curtained, high-ceilinged second-floor bedroom, writing poems and letters at night at a child’s school desk, sewing the poems into packets, locking the packets away for discovery after she’d passed, redefining the landscape of poetry, repopulating it with her own capitalization, punctuation, and meter; throwing off the shackles of convention, crafting a new persona for the first person as a keen, sharp-sighted, ironic observer who confronted head-on society’s constraints and limitations and replaced them with imagined and imaginable alternatives; sharing little, publishing little, retreating into herself for the sake of her revolutionary art, leaving a legacy of almost 1,800 idiosyncratic, enigmatic poems and 10,000 letters that spellbind us still?

~

I’m Nobody! Who are you? - Emily Dickinson

~

April is the cruelest month, insists T. S. Eliot.

~

A repurposed wasteland appears.

The walls whitewashed.

The floors swept.

But the rooms remain empty.

Meanwhile, stories . . .

~

It's 1967. The Summer of Love.

You're living in a VW Bus

trout fishing in America with Richard Brautigan

drifting along like an easy creek

reading poetry to find yourself . . .

~

How should a person be?, asks Sheila Heti.

~

What is it all about?

What are you all about?

You get what you put into trout fishing in America

stepping in the water

feeling the cool drift

taking it with you.

Taking what?

The otherworldly contours of love.

The spellbinding angularities.

The waking-in-the-middle-of-the-night inconsistencies.

The ups and downs . . . the ins and outs . . . the wicked game.

~

She dances to Strauss's Annen Polka,

floating with the wide-eyed innocence

of a nine-year-old who has yet to glimpse

the world of the backstage.

Look at her taut sureness, the steadiness and poise,

the promise of her young movements

as they transcend choreography with a joy that,

you can only hope, will buoy her through a life

filled with huge pockets of uncertainty.

~

. . . and so the damage

the static of hair between eye sockets

dropping to the floor

arms shaking

making room for 9-1-1's

Which hospital?

before hitting the siren

over snow-covered streets

as if we are going

to grandmother's house.

~

You cross over and find yourself in a choral group

performing Arvo Pärt’s The Peace.

This is good. This is really good.

The puzzle at the foot of your bed?

You try to recall the connection.

The mystery of happiness without remorse

or something like that. You’re not sure.

Here’s how it’s done, the caped magician told you

after your eighth birthday party.

Misdirection. Misdirection.

~

At 42, she faced her final storm,

and now floats, high above the seas,

guiding fellow sailors,

her last words, Goodbye, my love.

You turn the soil for a vegetable garden:

tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant.

Rhode Island Reds appear

scratching for worms with gnarled, yellow claws.

Your grandfather, a blacksmith,

is here, too, from the dead,

a stubby Philip Morris dangling from his lower lip.

He speaks to you, in Polish, about happiness.

~

K. H. Brandenburg tweaks an algorithm

for compressing audio files to birth MP3s

using Suzanne Vega's a cappella, Tom's Diner.

~

You return to a post

about a rhino poacher

who was stomped to death by an elephant

then eaten by a pride . . .

~

She checks herself out of detox

chugging rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer

and into an ICU where a voice says

You're not going anywhere

but to a psych ward

and a 28-day program . . .

and the Monkey laughs

and rides shotgun

through late-night streets.

~

It's good that grandma's here

on this early July morning

on the beach

in her housedress

with her beach chair

and it's good that she's invited you

to sit on her lap for a while,

watch your cousins in the water

and slowly wade into the day.

~

On reconnaissance in his second tour of Viet Nam,

he takes a shrapnel

dying 35 years later at 57

without a memory of a parade

because there were none.

~

Looking at the lobsters in their watery cells

awaiting execution by boiling water

reminds you of David Foster Wallace,

clinically depressed for most of his life

who one day stopped taking Nardil

walked out onto his back porch

threw a rope over a beam and hanged himself.

Wallace was an abusive assaultive explosive misogynistic

gifted alcoholic and drug addict.

Looking away from the lobsters

you think of Consider the Lobster

Wallace’s essay highlighting the unethical abuse of animals

in which he asks

Is it right to boil alive a sentient creature

for our gustatory pleasure?

Knowing that the so-called scream

of the lobster being boiled alive

is not its voice but air rushing out

of the holes in its shell doesn’t help . . .

nor should it.

~

You've stopped by again today

to see how your father's doing.

It's August and he's eighty-six.

He's asked for some blackberries,

so you're out here,

in the blackberry bushes,

in shirt and tie,

picking.

~

You get lost with Chet Baker

replaying the opening bars

to All Blues from The Last Great Concert 

recorded two weeks before he fell

out of a window in Amsterdam . . .

because you can't stop

because it's real

one of the realest things you've encountered . . .

~

She breaks into her counselor's office

at the therapeutic community house

drinks a bottle of hand sanitizer

and is taken to the emergency room

where she drinks more hand sanitizer

then sneaks out of the hospital . . . wasted . . .

She's picked up by the police

taken to a homeless shelter

on Christmas Eve

then back to the community house

the day after Christmas

where she apologizes to her counselor

and the other residents

and is put on probation . . .

binging . . . purging . . .

She is given the option of treatment for bulimia . . .

She refuses

and is discharged to a cot

in a warming center

where the lights go out at 9 . . .

Next day . . . she's back on the street . . .

~

Do you believe in magic?

Of course you do.

~

March 28, 1941, a little before noon

Virginia Woolf

with hat walking stick overcoat and large heavy stone

wades into the River Ouse drowning herself.

She was an escape artist

who mapped the extraordinariness

of our interiors . . .

not unlike Anthony Bourdain

who wanted to be remembered as an enthusiast

introducing us to the wonderful world of food

in all its wonderfulness

before hanging himself

in a hotel room in eastern France . . .

~

Elizabeth Bishop catches a tremendous fish.

~

The neighborhood Carl Jung

at the wheel of a Ferrari

cruises you on your bimonthly talking cure

collecting your unconscious

to pry open the shyness

that smacks you back

to the darkness of OCD . . .

You enjoy these cosplays

with their pretend puddings

and freedom from counting syllables . . .

It's all theater, yes? . . . 

~

Latin Class. 1960.

Julius Caesar is dividing Gaul into three parts.

Three rows over, an upperclassman,

in the school uniform

imprisons you in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

with her long legs

while Marcus Tullius Cicero addresses the Senate

with his Third Oration:

How long, O Catiline, will you tax our endurance?

How long will that madness of yours escape us?

To what end will your unruly boldness hurl itself at us?

This, by the way, is an example of trichotomy,

says Sister Anna Roberta, in full habit . . .

~

. . . and why the Fates red-carded Caesar

in the middle of the Rubicon

and why Hannibal joined the circus

and mastered elephantese.

~

I can well understand why children love sand, says Wittgenstein. 

~

Frank O'Hara appears.

He's living in a yurt . . . in the 'Dacks

doing this . . . doing that

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

~

And how about Gustav Mahler

channeling Frank O'Hara . . . bicycling Bavaria:

I seem to be absolutely born for the cycle!

deconstructing Moby's Porcelain

disconnecting the dots

as if it matters . . . and it does . . . but not to

his gorgeous, alcoholic, hearing-impaired,

superflirty, 19 years his junior, wife and muse, Alma,

whose bedpost is mottled

with the notches of affairs.

Billed as the most beautiful girl in Vienna

she believes several men are better than one

and spills as much to Freud

one afternoon on his couch.

Never a fan of her husband's music

she chooses none of his for her funeral

50 years after his death.

~

And here again is Frank:

It's my lunch hour, so I go

for a walk among the hum-colored

cabs. First, down the sidewalk

where laborers feed their dirty

glistening torsos sandwiches

and Coca-Cola, . . .

~

A photograph's all that's left of you, sing Simon and Garfunkel.

~

O. Winston Link and his assistant

photograph the last days of steam locomotives

rumbling through town

four warning blasts at the crossing.

~

A Chinese takeaway with a stem of Malbec.

You examine religious artifacts and collages

and a life drawing class

in the bedroom

captivated

by the mouth and angle of shoulders

as she turns to read the script’s next line.

~

An algorithm walks into a bar

quoting José Ortega y Gasset:

I am I and my circumstances.

~

You’re walking along Commercial Street

in Provincetown

past Mary Oliver's ghost

sitting outside her oceanfront cottage

then on to the tip of the Cape

and Stanley Kunitz's tiered garden,

snakes dangling head-down, entwined

in a brazen love-knot . . .

the tide lapping the Provincetown Inn

with memories of the Moors . . .

more than a bit raffish . . .

presided over by Scooter, the pet owl . . .

~

And here’s Gary Snyder's homage

to log truck drivers:

In the high seat, before-dawn dark,

Polished hubs gleam

And the shiny diesel stack

warms and flutters

Up the Tyler Road grade

To the logging on Poorman creek.

Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life . . . indeed . . .

~

Listening to it, we become ocean, says John Cage.

~

Become ocean . . . all become ocean.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

prestidigitating words words words

into cauldrons of delight

the double double toil and troublers

given 24 hours to get outta Dodge

while you like Proust

for a long time going to bed early

seduce the watcher at the gate

slip past the dozing Rottweilers

in the warm fragrant kitchen

and into the hidden room

behind the stacks in the library

to gaze upon hundreds of portraits of beauty

from the comfort of a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

white leather Barcelona chair

circa 1929

before being eyeblinked back

to Tanglewood

surrounded by shadowy strangers

plodding toward the parking lot

united in their quest

for their anxious vehicles

chomping at the bit to traverse

lonely upstate two-lanes

on their late-night return trip home.

~

It comes full circle . . . all of it . . .

the dots connected . . . disconnected . . .

fading from view . . .

with paybacks and fallbacks

playbacks and callbacks

wetbacks and drybacks

and boxes of ephemera

near the counter of the old, lamented

Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston,

Dan Chaisson wrote in The New Yorker

brimmed with

mangy postcards

wedding announcements

lobby cards

vinyl LPs

hippie stickers and patches

Civil Defense pamphlets and evacuation maps

poker chips

Old Maid decks

and skinny dogeared self-published PO-ET-RY chapbooks.

~

The mixing of your lines

bears the awesomeness of youth.

The imperfection is imperfect, perhaps,

yet as perfectly as possible

as perfectly as you know how

with the almost-imperceptible mistakes

making it delightful.

Let disorder triumph along the boulevards of redaction

where the ifs ands and buts barter transfusions.

Adjusting your sightline along the monochrome,

you resemble a look-alike

from your favorite film - The Turin Horse -

the wake of which is a which of a which

but my advice is not to wait it out.

You will know, trust me.

And it will be good.

~

You write what you want to write in the way that it has to be,

says Anne Carson.

~

Late at night when you lie awake,

tell yourself that you love who you are,

that your half-concealed life

is not without promise.

Anka Zhuravleva

Screen Dump 764

You were shrunk by a shrink in a pop-up

during a blow-out BOGO sale

words flying off shelves

into Dharma bowls

prepped by line cooks for enlightenment . . .

presentation is everything, yes? . . .

There was a time . . . I mean . . .

I'm not sure what I mean . . .

without the script, perhaps? . . .

your one wild and precious life

walking Commercial Street

past Mary Oliver's ghost

sitting outside her oceanfront cottage

then on to the other end

Stanley Kunitz's tiered garden

snakes dangling head-down, entwined

in a brazen love-knot . . .

the tide lapping the Provincetown Inn

with memories of the Moors . . .

more than a bit raffish . . .

presided over by Scooter, the pet owl . . .

There is no other life . . .

Gary Snyder's homage

to log truck drivers:

In the high seat, before-dawn dark,

Polished hubs gleam

And the shiny diesel stack

warms and flutters

Up the Tyler Road grade

To the logging on Poorman creek.

Thirty miles of dust.

There is no other life . . . indeed . . .

This to be archived for odysseyites

in a reconfigured deconsecrated chapel

near Portofino, Italy . . .

Anja Niemi

Screen Dump 763

As if the movie was afraid . . .

so in the first episode

this face . . . and you're thinking

take this face through the whole movie

but nope, you're tossed into a dark room

writing over your writing

because you can't see . . .

words like dictation

the rain in Spain gives you wet brain . . .

Now you're worrying about remembering

to google unclogging a drain . . .

It's like that

the obliqueness

trying to fit it all into some designated,

predetermined framework . . .

The delusion of illusion, yes? . . .

and you're riffing on the responsibility

of the artist not to look away . . .

to render what to you is real . . .

But it's late, really late

for these visitors . . . these night stalkers

too late to be assailed

by the critic at the gate . . .

Too many weary heads

dislocating too many weary shoulders . . .

Carmen Watkins

Screen Dump 762

Lion-obsessed Venetian iconographies

the size of Montana

crowd your nightscapes . . .

animals hiding in twisted sheets

swipe smartphones . . .

walleyed tourists board water-buses

to carry them to paintings

displayed salon-style from floor to ceiling . . .

The neighborhood Carl Jung

at the wheel of a Ferrari

cruises you on your bimonthly talking cure

collecting your unconscious

to pry open the shyness

that smacks you back

to the darkness of OCD . . .

You enjoy these costumey affairs

with their pretend puddings

and freedom from counting syllables . . .

It's all theater, yes? . . . well, maybe not

but we won't know until the credits scroll

and critics email their reviews

to odysseyites waiting to board . . .

Monika Ekiert Jezusek

Screen Dump 761

You recall Anne Carson on swimming:

. . . smoothing out the strokes in water filled with anxieties:

You can fail it with each stroke.

What does that mean, fail it? . . .

The poet, John Ashbery, blocked, envisioned

three empty oblong boxes to fill with words . . .

He dipped into The Cloud of Unknowing . . .

You like this idea and decide to try it . . .

filling a container with words

and whipping them into a poem . . .

Finding your way in a forest of well-crafted similes . . .

the rationales we muster . . .

What are you talking about? . . .

You know, to pass muster . . .

But is it that easy? . . .

No, not easy, there are huge holes . . .

yes, holes, that could trip you up

so that you'd have to start over again . . . Sisyphean . . . 

especially now, with the final station coming into view . . .

Nonetheless, . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 760

Illusory at best, yes? . . .

This freedom of treading the remains of the day

caressing costumes

pocketing smiles

not unlike a silent film

where the audience can see what the actors cannot . . .

Gawking at the exhibit

within the resilience of a gift shop

an oasis ensconced in the rude . . .

later mapping the yellow brick road

perhaps indefinitely

noting the binge of history

as a way to memorialize your having been here . . .

convincing the watcher at the gate that your words

are suitcased and ready for a weekend getaway . . .

Leila Forés

Screen Dump 759

As if at one remove . . . transcribing

the moment to moment with reverse innuendo . . .

a reason for everything

a reason for the body

a reason for the body of the other . . .

Squeezing through an eastern window

the process beginning years ago

adding language's decrepitude to the mix

of polishing a lens . . . a lens to better see . . .

To better see what? . . .

To better see anything . . . everything . . .

and look, there's even room for more . . .

Do you expect the end as predicted? . . .

howling through a nor'easter

(kidding, but how about if it were) . . .

then struggling to get the words right . . . 

another backstory arriving on the 1:05

with conspicuous palettes to color whatever 'scapes

you have prepared a pitch for . . .

Leila Forés

 

 Screen Dump 86

(reposted from Wednesday, June 11, 2014)

You enter a room . . . forget why . . . read . . . then not . . .
The dumbness of the day . . .

of putting one word in front of the other
of putting your hands in your pockets

of putting your hands in their pockets . . .
The intimation of intimacy . . .
of finding someone's clothes in your closet
of finding someone on the other side of the bed . . .
Have you forgotten about the tickets . . .
the quart of milk . . . low-fat . . .
the gestures . . . out of balance . . . of yet another day? . . .
The loneliness of long distance runners . . .
the scent of green filling your nostrils . . .
You can't wait . . . to tell someone . . .
To re-string the instrument . . . unplayed for far too long . . .
A question of sooner or later . . .
Your own wish to become a blankness . . . forestalled . . .

Saskia de Brauw

Screen Dump 758

You practice your lines in a two-way mirror

plagiarizing last night's notes

ghosts escaping into the semantic other

balancing tongues

at least believing such

that this is the way you have learned

to manage the world . . .

to manage you in the world . . .

Something will come undone . . .

You will then fondle happy moments

lipsyncing the middle of a chapter

from your childhood's diorama

carried along by the current . . .

your grocery list sheepishly revealing the answer 

to a question you have yet to ask . . .

the neighborhood's scammed

as odysseyites fill their foreigns with ancient myths . . .

Kate Barry

Screen Dump 757

Your earlier self inhabits the body . . .

A trolley on a back street searches for passengers

who were meant to be elsewhere . . .

You'd better not hear me say that! . . .

the weird aftertaste when you at least tried . . .

then the green of a standin

asleep in the other room . . .

Yes, perhaps the endgame

which if nothing else will stoke the confusion . . .

Someone will be kicked to the curb

before the overflow is reckoned with

and rendered inconsequential . . .

You began the conversation on a positive note . . .

a concert A? . . .

yes, that's it, you said, recognizing

the ramifications of a lost lyric

in the early morning, no, no, not that,

it wasn't that, I'm sure . . .

It's not about making the cut

the call and response . . . that sort of thing

reconfigured from audio files

dropped off at a transfer station . . .

It's about a musical suite in a stand of pines . . .

Can you imagine the confusion

of a left turn . . . then another . . . and another? . . .

Nervous motion, head jerks, tics, shouts . . .

The sinister recording of happenstance

followed by a rewind, a retelling . . .

Eva Torkarchuk

Screen Dump 756

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 . . .
The deck is stacked but you know that . . .

Veganism? . . . OK, veganism . . .

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

The time your pickup broke down

leaving you stranded in nowhereland

only to be dropped off at a subway stop

staring at 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 strange tongue . . .

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 reshoot? . . .

Take a moment to close read your journal

then return to the diorama of your neighborhood . . .

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 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 . . .

Everyone thinks about changing the world

and no one thinks about changing themselves . . .

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

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 using a prepared piano

you 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