Screen Dump 636

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 . . .

Felicity Jones in The Aeronauts (2019)

Screen Dump 635

Then you would become a sous-chef

slathered with olive oil for the full catastrophe,

keenly aware of the archival method

of posthumous publication

especially when the sommelier

training for the Leadville 100

would take you to the wine cellar

for a peek at his training log . . .

Chaos under the guise of calm reigned . . .

You would reciprocate whenever possible

with quick-study dioramas

and modifications to the soaking tub . . .

The tenor of those days was typically dictated

by the nature of the homework assignment

which as contracted had to be completed

after assuming three of the five yoga poses

emailed in the wee hours . . .

That confusion was always bright

in the hillocks surrounding the lap pool

mattered little . . .

Screen Dump 634

The daily patdown . . . a costume change

with earbuds, boomboxes tagged and repurposed . . .

Nymphets frolic in the park's pool . . .

Investigative journalists look on for miscues . . .

At Stewart's a septuagenarian, commenting

on your aesthetics, asks about online courses . . .

a cosmic unraveling, harkening back

to that winter afternoon at the manhole

when filled with footnotes

you opted out with a trustee . . .

After shedding his false-face he began pacing

the air . . . you went off-script stammering

eulogies to snowstorms, making an hallucinatory exit

while morphing into a looking glass with fruits

far off and geometric . . .

Screen Dump 633

I can't go on, I'll go on . . .

          - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

You begin the day with edits . . .

The incredulous insist on separate checks

tweaking their counterproposal . . .

You know you can do this, yes? . . .

The tomato plants look surprisingly well . . .

The philosophical watering no doubt . . .

The dryer is beginning to react

to the way you crank out words

and feel sure about the bespoked . . .

Walking through the undergrowth

on the way to the firewood lean-to

in dress shoes is reminiscent

of your college biology field trip

when the professor commented

on your fortitude . . . and more . . .

Then the dream of a woman with two kids

running in the passing lane on a highway

and arriving with time to spare . . .

For what, you ask? . . . This happened

and it happened while you were away

only to resurface with black-capped

chickadees and goldfinches

at the tube feeder with two cats

repositioning themselves

and deer looking on from the woods . . .

How many acts in your next one? . . .

Will there be a costume change?

a script change? Of course there's never

enough time to go on with the makeover . . .

A pint sounds like a plan . . .

Craig McDean

Screen Dump 632

And here despite the opening credits

is the turnkey scene

with all gathered 'round for takeaways

from the beloved soon-to-expire . . .

takeaways to clutter the walkups

of your immunocompromised self . . .

Cue up The Last Station

for Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's spin

on what matters

when it all begins grinding to a halt

with a drizzle of rice vinegar . . .

Turn the page, please . . .

A bear walks into a bar on a dog day afternoon . . .

Again, please . . .

Life out of balance . . .

OK, field notes wither you . . .

You'd think they were the only ones . . .

How about a pop-up pastoral with odysseyites

waist-deep in knee-jerk conceits

dropping PEZ with the intensity of slam dunks

while sampling craft beer à la carte? . . .

You're right to worry the absence of joviality . . .

The countdown, then . . .

How about that? . . .

Is that enough? . . .

Is it enough to parse

the short attention span of Youtubers

while your double traces your moment(um)

sitting at home on a yoga mat

fingering designer beads

the requisite number of times? . . .

The book escapes your late night hands

and rewrites itself to mirror the dystopia du jour . . .

Time is running out . . .

And not because of nothing either . . .

Mirjana Grasser

  

Psychology 101 : Adrift in Theory

(reposted from Friday, May 27, 2011)

Wolfgang Kohler's ape, Sultan, snaps together two sticks

and snags a banana from the ceiling of his cage.

The hole in Wolfgang's theory

is greater than the sum of its parts.

Pavlov's dogs drool to the tintinnabulation of bells,

happy they won't be rocketed into space for at least 40 years.

Fred Skinner's pigeons play ping pong for food pellets during the day,

launder money at night in the school's photography lab.

John B. Watson, Behaviorism's father, beds down his lab assistant

and is given his walking papers. He stumbles into advertising

and rises to VP writing copy for cigarette ads.

One of his grad students, Mary Cover Jones, counterconditions

four-year-old Peter's fear of animals using scoops of ice cream.

She sells her idea to Ben and Jerry.

Sigmund Freud smokes cigars, collects Egyptian artifacts,

wears out 306 couches, bifurcates humans

into those who wish for a penis and those who fear for their penis.

He sees no happy medium.

Clifford Beers jumps out of a fourth floor window into a mud puddle,

foiling his suicide attempt and priming his pen for a "Mind That Found Itself,"

while Gustav Theodor Fechner's opus "The Mental Life Of Flowers"

is too much too soon.

Harry Harlow tricks rhesus monkeys into falling in love with stuffed animals.

They hide his booze, sending him over the edge of a visual cliff.

Alfred Binet puts together a test to measure intelligence.

He should have stuck to law.

Hermann Rorschach spills a bottle of ink and markets his accident

for countless James Joyce wannabes.

A stick of dynamite drives a crowbar through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe.

He becomes a sideshow sensation

and prefrontal lobotomies become the therapy of choice

for society's square pegs.

Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini compare notes with Mary Shelley,

use an electric current to induce epileptic seizures in patients with mental illness.

Erik Erikson studies art, comes to America as an art therapist,

and promptly loses his identity.

Philippe Pinel unchains the insane at La Salpetriere;

they join SAG, and get bit parts in J. L. Moreno's psychodrama, "King of Hearts."

R. D. Laing maintains that the world, not people, is mad,

drops acid with patients, dies of a heart attack while playing tennis in Saint Tropez.

Tommy Szasz argues that mental illness is a destructive social construct, a myth

and nothing more (or less) than “problems in living.”

Carl Jung has a midlife crisis and explores the occult; 

Alfred Adler strives for superiority; Abraham Maslow actualizes

himself in full view; Tom Harris assures us we're OK.

The sixty-minute hour turns out to be fifty-minutes long.

Philippe Pinel unchains the insane at La Salpetriere

Screen Dump 631

Met a little boy named Billy Joe

And then I almost lost my mind . . .

          - The Shirelles, Mama Said

Again, you are credited with holding things together . . .

Nightmarish, yes? . . .

The heat loosening the jaw . . .

Underwriters squawking about clowns

in huge blue suede shoes

doing drive-bys on knee scooters

soundtracked by The Shirelles' Mama Said

then slow-dancing to Dedicated To The One I Love . . .

The chemo gushes through your skinbag . . .

And now you're demanding what? . . . a recount? . . .

Taking stock of your hits and misses? . . .

A tad late, yes? . . .

Where have you been? . . .

Why the weathered hollow? . . .

The underestimation? . . .

The overestimation? . . .

The planting of trees? . . .

Theoretical, yes, but still the missing pieces . . .

I mean you've got this jabbering extra

who in the late innings is demanding a recount? . . .

But didn't you expect this would happen? . . .

I guess not . . . and that could be a good thing . . .

Clutching a ripped-out portrait of you

from five decades ago

leaning into a cue stick

for the eight ball in the corner pocket . . .

But the game was played out

and pocket protectors lined up to rue the day

you left with a Hi Ho Silver Away . . .

More about that later . . .

But now allow me to channel surf

with the rest of the plaintiffs slathered in grease . . .

Olympic Goldmedalist Gertrude Ederle (1926)

Screen Dump 630

Tracking the commotion of the birds . . .

I'll give you that . . .

Reconnecting with the airspace

jammed with hearsay

as if we didn't know . . .

I'm sorry about the ramifications . . .

It was sudden . . . and there . . .

the misty offset was to be expected I guess . . .

Playing . . . well, not really playing

but you know . . . the outer limits

and the notion that once there, always . . .

Diverting the next installment

and, I guess we can at least try . . .

If nothing else, being forced to make-do

with the stuff at hand

while those on board suffused with energy

are having a helluva good time . . .

The hidden drama as such . . .

I meant to deliver the renderings

in time for the mounting . . .

the one you've been hampering about . . .

Oh, I suppose . . .

Eva Tokarchuk

Screen Dump 629

Your paper-thin past resurfaced last night

regurgitating its conceit

with little imagination and little hope

for a paid leave which though still in the works

seems iffy enough to release the logjam

and fire up the drone . . .

You delivered lines from a backroom whodunit

so as not to get sucked into an obsession

before disappearing

into an adjacent performance space

where a misanthrope walked on eggs . . .

breaking many and leaving several wide-eyes

in a quandary . . . Remnants of your past life

lie  strewn here and there

as if holding forth in some makeshift vestibule

which in retrospect is a fitting tribute

to endplayers of all persuasions . . .

Your future is at risk of being grayed out . . .

Eva Tokarchuk

Screen Dump 628

Little ones, no less, notwithstanding, trip over the hill

to grandmother's . . . walk backwards, hands down . . . as told . . .

You appear, seemingly out of nowhere, accoutered in code

shouting objectification, objectification . . .

willing to own your obscurantism . . .

It was this way on this year's last day . . .

Several vaxed and boostered called in with COVID . . .

The beaches filled with bodies . . .

Fans outnumbered readers at the double header . . .

Someone with little brouhaha jumped into a sea of words . . .

You shared an app that displayed the names of the high peaks . . .

The downpour slammed, quashing the trailhead . . .

Then breakfast at a greasy spoon . . . with you totally immersed

in The Modern Rustic . . .

Jarek Kubicki

Screen Dump 627

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

          - The Beatles, A Day in the Life

You plant bonsai off-center . . . count crows . . .

The deep woods tease . . .

endless . . . especially with the notion of furthermore

the road humming along with distant inklings

as if you didn't need much fossil fuel

to convince the engines of thought to reconsider . . .

There was nothing in the script about Speak, Memory . . .

so they pampered Lolita

and you sort of turned off your brain

and enjoyed the ride

eschewing first-hand accounts of survival in extreme conditions . . .

the whole autofiction thing: throwing open windows and doors

bypassing the talk-talk of what happened

going directly to the inside of what happened . . .

The string said 10 dimensions

but there were no buybacks at checkout . . .

This is you following the dotted line to your past life . . .

A Day in the Lives

You think about the day's heat . . .

how you had considered

ordering in again

from the newish sandwich shop in the neighborhood . . .

how you made the decision to leave your apartment

get some fresh air

walk to this restaurant

get away from the poem you've been troubling over

the apprehension of confronting the empty page

the excitement of the writing once begun

of crafting a poem out of nothing-at-all

as if an act of prestidigitation . . .

pulling words out of a hat

massaging them, playing with them, pushing them around,

shaping them into different, sometimes odd,

unconventional, but magical pieces.

The walk works . . . you feel surprisingly refreshed.

It seems a perfect day.

~

The sommelier uncorking your bottle of red

is troubled by a feeling of anxiety.

He’s been thinking about his ex

whom he hasn't seen in months.

He woke this morning thinking about him . . .

thinking about the confused feelings he still has.

He's doing his best to perform his duties

present the bottle

uncork it

place the cork on the table

pour a taste into a stemmed glass

making sure to twist and lift the bottle ever so slightly

to eliminate drips and end the pour

step back and await your call.

His white shirt is inconspicuously immaculate

as are his black trousers.

He's been a sommelier at this three-star restaurant for three years.

He enjoys it.

He enjoys the respectability of being a master sommelier . . .

the years spent honing his expertise.

He sees that there are other tables awaiting him.

His mind flits about.

He had considered calling out of work

but was struck by a sense of loyalty.

Loyalty didn't seem too lofty for what he was feeling

so despite the muggy, withering heat 

he came to work

hoping it would derail his obsessing.

~

The two women at the next table are regulars.

They are good friends.

One of them lost her husband to cancer a few months ago.

She has mornings when she doesn't want to get out of bed.

Her friend suggested grief counseling.

She went to a few sessions but they didn’t seem to help

so she stopped going.

She is thankful for her friend.

She enjoys her company

and the times they spend together.

At this restaurant, for example.

It's one of their favorites.

They chat with the sommelier.

The chef will soon join them.

~

The chef is on the phone with his wife.

She’s telling him that their son has been arrested for a DUI.

On top of that he mouthed off to the officers

so they cuffed him and took him to the station.

The chef and his wife are at wit’s end.

In the past year their son dropped out of college.

They're pretty sure he’s doing drugs.

He's become indifferent.

He doesn’t seem to care about anything but getting high.

He’s become increasingly disrespectful.

He was seeing a girl but she hasn’t been around.

He says he’s going to get a job and move out,

get his own apartment.

He can’t stand living there anymore.

He mocks them when they suggest that he needs help

that he should see a counselor or therapist.

Someone to talk to.

~

Elsewhere, the sommelier’s ex is driving an SUV.

Three friends are with him.

They have just enjoyed dinner at a restaurant

and are excited about tomorrow’s round of golf.

Last week he received a recall notice

about a potential hazard with the SUV’s tie rods.

He made an appointment for next week

to have the them replaced.

In about one hour, on a hill, the SUV’s tie rod will snap.

The SUV will crash through the guardrail,

flip onto its side, careen down an embankment into a river.

Everyone will be killed.

Screen Dump 626

The view of the river from [insert age here] reloads your page

calibrating the enlargement

of having had the pleasure of their company . . .

None running on empty

None running away

None running . . . running . . . running . . .

The party of the first part struggles with its own lack of identity . . .

its own lack of clarity . . .

Not all that different from the run-of-the-mill 

who look both ways and try to make the most of it

while awaiting deportation to the opening of a one-act play

by your once-upon-a-time favorite playwright

who was last seen loading his autographed remainders

into a cart in a pop-up yurt for ocean kayak rentals . . .

Was the time spent indeed time wasted? . . .

Spin it as you will so as not to provoke a sense of entitlement . . .

Page through the collected somethings of someone

feel the waves of whatever embrace you

and you will be gifted the passcode

to an inner sanctum filled with the unexpurgated thought bubbles

of someone on the brink . . .

Now is the time to return the overdue library books

to their rightful owners

as if the difference between then and now

is a imaginary number . . .

Jarek Kubicki

Screen Dump 625

But it's not that . . . it's something else . . .

Isn't it called a fugue state? . . .

To be unmuted without warning . . .

Going here and there and here and there . .  . to quell the anxiety . . .

The conditional . . . always the conditional . . .

How many scenes have you fled . . .

scenes of a crime . . . accompanied

by the lost and found . . . the found soliloquy . . .

listening to the found soliloquy late at night

when the romper-clads invade the dreamscape

and the streets grow ears . . . for tell-tale heartbreaks . . .

When is too much? . . .

I mean . . . wait, I don't know what I mean . . .

The clock counts the pages . . .

and the projects . . . one after another . . . are jettisoned

as if in Spellcheckland . . . can you imagine? . . .

The competition continuous . . .

reminiscent of bantering

without the semi-consciousness of regret . . .

well, maybe after a moment's reflection

the curb building up . . . and you ramrodding

the endgame's absurdist, tragicomic, grotesque story-within-a-story

that you've been working on in a shack in the dunes . . .

Imagining the gloom apart from some unspecified end . . .

There's more . . . wait . . .

The nonsensical that we juggle

and the tribes that assemble . . . at a moment's notice . . . and . . .

Jennifer Flowers in Samuel Beckett's Endgame (2016)

Screen Dump 624

Crating the incidentals for the move

while buckling beneath the ranter's rants from elsewhere . . .

without which  . . . only so much . . . and then? . . .

The seating chart backed up against the wall

covered with the defensive eloquence

of an electric tricycle . . .

Your costume sutured with bird droppings

you enter the fray with yesterday's menu . . .

the dumbfoundedness of the feed . . .

seconds . . . thirds . . . fourths . . .

reaching for cardiovascularity's price point . . .

There's so much at stake

with a walk along the canal . . . drydocked vessels pine

for the podium to incubate nautical miles

where he and she and they searched for missing links

under the banner No More Utopias . . .

Tech support isn't . . .

You immerse yourself in the well's baptismal waters

color-coded for easy lookups into online divestitures . . .

The steamboat sprouts arms

for 15 minutes of infamy on the battle inside your head . . .

Irma Haselberger

Screen Dump 623

As if today's sky is an accident . . . Naysayers think it hopeless . . .

propose derailments . . . Fantastic scenes with smudged erasures . . .

You retrieve the moment . . .

Your inner Rapunzel dyes her roots bright red . . .

That should do it

humming All Along the Watchtower

with odysseyites knighting old heroes

brought in to trash gloom . . .

Credits flatten the teleprompter's ennui . . .

Roots enflamed, you become unshatterable

conducting tours of the herbarium at the botanical garden . . .

bench pressing your weight between go-betweens . . .

Screen Dump 622

 

You complain about street stares

the nomenclature of being neither here nor there . . .

a life of surreptitious appropriation

of egress odysseys misgivings

but without which the self-indulgent

click dead links

waiting for a remake of the opening scene

to Beckett's Act Without Words . . .

Postdocs duped into defending their proofs

on the 10-yard line have been given the day off

to search for moments of joy . . .

It's not without benefit, is it? . . .

There's always the captivation of a demi plié . . .

And then you continued with furthermore

adding to the incomprehensibility of Legos

when noodling riffs as ammo

for grandmasters at square one . . .

But it's not . . . Regrettably? . . .

Accumulating insignificant raptures? . . .

You think it possible? . . .

There are enough connections to engage a default

with purveyors of copper wiring cashing out

when storm clouds blunder in . . .

And why is that? . . .

No idea, but it's right here in my pocket protector . . .

Always one to do it up right, yes? . . .

I suppose so, if I must . . .

Have you ever done things that you wouldn't do

under normal conditions? . . .

Freakishly normal, yes . . .

In the company of tight ponytailed cowboy shirts . . .

The script failed . . . to no one's dismay

so we packed up the snake oil van and slithered out . . .

Leila Fores

Screen Dump 621

We are all suspect

riding victorious in white chariots drawn by white horses

parading through the streets

earwormed with the caveat

All glory is fleeting . . .

prompting you to reconsider life's Rolodex

with the Titanic's burial soundtracked

not by Nearer My God To Thee as tabloided

but by Archibald Joyce's Songe d'Automne . . .

Oh, to be in England now that April's there, yes? . . .

Here's to April's blizzard

as the tray feeders become high-trafficked areas . . .

George C. Scott's Patton, It was here;

the battlefield was here . . .

A grackle flexes its wings . . . impressing no one . . .

bill tilts abound

all shapes and sizes and ages scatter

with the arrival of a needle-beaked red-bellied woodpecker

while inside the cat chows down on a dictionary

dribbling words from his chops . . .

The meaning of this and that has left the building

on African war pachyderms

crossing the Alps to Hannibalize Rome . . .

A takeaway box and a paradigm shift

and the boiler's red eye reset button eyes you

as if through a glass and darkly

in the darkness of the basement . . .

The voices in the walls guest the power outage

with live links for the woebegotten

waving both hands in the air using a twisting movement . . .

Leila Fores

My poem "Walking the Cat" has been selected by the Hudson Valley Writers Guild for consideration by visual artists from the Upstate Artists Guild to create an artwork inspired by the poem both of which will be included in an exhibit scheduled for September.

Walking the Cat

She prefers to spend her days lazed

in the stuffy arms of a chair by the window

where she can keep an emerald eye

peeled for caricatures in the street.

Her pleasures are unparalleled

though this morning she carried on

about the hot cereal being anything but.

Later, despite the coming snow

she insisted on our usual walk -

the side streets troubled by student drivers

at ten and two, the vacant lot flecked

with white. We stopped for a paper

which pleased her to no end, knowing

it would eventually wind up in her box.

She doesn't seem to mind old news.

On the way home she mentioned

the snow blower which I should have

had serviced in the fall, and her wish

to return to her pastime of compiling lists

of restaurants with take-out sushi

at reasonable prices for friends and acquaintances.

But you know how that goes.

Tara and Corleone

Blackberries

(reposted from Thursday, August 11, 2011)

When I lived closer I'd keep things cleaner,
weeding the bushes every now and then.

I had this pair of blue coveralls -
Frank sewn in red over the left pocket,

the name of my friend's father,
who repaired radiators

till the acid ate his lungs.
I'd pull on the coveralls,

wade into the blackberry bushes
and pick away, protected.

I've stopped by again today
to see how my father's doing.

It's August and he's eighty-six.
He's asked for some blackberries,

so I'm out here, in shirt and tie,
picking.

Screen Dump 620

As if your carouseled life had been nominated for an Oscar . . .

The scene in the supermarket

with triads played out of time

by woodwind player wannabes . . .

Imagine the confusion of recurring themes

delivered post hoc by paramilitarists

dressed to kill . . . and do . . .

Where have all the flowers gone? . . .

C'mon, sing with me . . . if for no other reason

then we're here . . . together . . .

in this cluttered, trampled,

underappreciated landscape . . .

Hey, the re-enactors are still here

and I feel in my bones that they can make a difference

changing the subjunctive as directed . . .

stepping up to the mic

with proper intonation . . .

There's never been a better wishbone, yes? . . .

Screen Dump 619

You leave them in the early hours

their heads adrift in autofictions

memories of costumes

worn by people of the high Urals . . .

You ride their falsified credentials

into the countryside

open to the sound of your tiny cabin

on the side of a hill above a river . . .

the river you swim in and kayak on

between your missions-impossible . . .

Ghosts keyboard the voices

in your head . . .

Books kindle your world

in the words of odysseyites

trafficking in incidental phrases

and ads for river cruises . . .

At dawn most days you rise

to patch leaks in the clouds

with an awesomeness that grows . . .

Irma Hasselberger

 Gone

(reposted from Wednesday, April 18, 2012)

          for Catherine Mary Connolly (1969-2012)

You have faced the final storm, and now float,
high above the seas, guiding fellow sailors.
The days have begun to lighten;
the nights are open windows.
I turn the soil for a vegetable garden:
tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant.
Rhode Island Reds appear
scratching for worms with gnarled, yellow claws.
My grandfather is here, too,
a stubby Philip Morris dangling from his lower lip.
He speaks to me, in Polish, about happiness.

Screen Dump 618

This shred of arrogance kept popping up in the living room

as if at the appointed hour

you are the whole in your seemingly illogical . . .

Where do we stand? . . .

There was nothing not to like about it

of course it had many iterations . . .

so many that the scorecard filed a grievance

and left us with little to say

especially when your publicist struck a dissonant chord . . .

With so few clusters you have to wonder

though I suppose one could argue the converse . . .

Leila Fores

Rensselaerville Library’s sixth 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

180 poems by 110 poets.

Stop by PAD2022 for your daily poetry fix!

Screen Dump 617

Why page through your wrinkles? . . .

It's late but what is time? . . .

and here comes the morning up the garden path

to help with turning the soil

for the excited plants . . .

And the songbirds . . .

Go ahead . . . Go in . . . Can you imagine? . . .

Yes, things will come into play,

I suppose, and, yes, one day

the ashes will pass Go . . .

But now you're here . . . filling with wonder . . .

Green tea! . . . Don't forget the green tea . . .

It will help you clear the hurdles

with happiness . . . and hilarity

for your glorious head . . .

Deborah  Turbeville

Screen Dump 616

You're in a parking lot fingering your phone

directing the play by play by play

the fridge pissing off neighbors with its barking

then this mad cow parks in a handicap spot

Don't have a cow, dude! . . .

Really? . . . I mean REALLY? . . .

The subterfuged world never at a loss for

That's how we do it . . . by the witless . . .

Sputtering with malcontent you take a breather

then, a tearful delivery, a tearful moment

at the whiteboard with a invalid proof

for mathematicians-a-go-go . . .

the bartender gaslighting the hammered

who humble back to their hovel

to be set upon by octopi or octopodes

in the watery world of the socked and soaked . . .

I want to hold your hand? . . . I don't think so! . . .

The world as experienced . . . in all its flatness is so . . . 

Yesterday,

all my troubles seemed so far away . . .

Glass's koyaanisqatsi (Hey, look, a q without a u!)

You enter the world of metal detectors where

fixed income instruments or bonds

follow just intonation

allowing you to nix diversification

and preserve the (High School) Principal

who is poised to flop into bed

with the School Nurse on paid leave . . .

Ba Ba Bond . . . James Bond . . .

Perhaps you should appeal to happenstance

especially after factoring everything down

to the list of pall bearers still In the Still of the Night . . .

It's time once again to head out

to the dollar store for a ramification

or a conciliation . . . or a pontification . . . or a Jorge . . .

Of course you knew him . . . he was one of many

on your to-do list . . . after deconstructing

the ins and outs of the allegorical Lord of the Flies:

Maybe there is a beast. Maybe it's . . . us? . . .

Come down from there . . . to the slots in the casino

where the real is really real

and you'll be as broke and as fit as a broken fiddle . . .

Par excellence the auteur! . . .

I had heard that you had been hobbled by the last stanza

but hey you can always deposit your ashes

in a local tributary and watch them

float downstream as we assemble according

to the directions scribbled with a foreign tongue (ouch!) . . .

Deborah Turbeville

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Tooling along a coastal road on a café racer

bells whistles lace-up leathers

you speak in tongues to pick-up gamers gaming the small diamond

in view of a creek that runs through the woods

on its way to the river . . . the magic and mystery

of your roadhouse expertise

tipping tampered scales

back when coupes were the rage

and radio stations - the few - had to be dialed in

by turning a dial . . .

There was something about the static - the radio static -

that made you want to engage interior monologues -

iron clad center stage wordless soliloquies - with you

toggling obscurantism

and stepping up to the plate with a full count

mimicking the black and white colorways of radio silence . . .

You seek salvation - fresh and focused - behind Razer glasses

tweaking the list of odysseyites docked for cleaning the roundabout

imagining a four-score and 20 return

on a tracking device that breaks free of the dream

you obsess over with a randomness

whose silhouettes clutter the performance space

with overtures that beg for smoke and mirrors . . .

This will have to do, yes? . . .
This apparition of sliding into decrepitude

as if your time capsule of an apartment belly-flops the water

shredding the pages of your future perfect waking life . . .

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Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos?

          - Virginia Woolf

You're taking notes on the straight and narrow

as the detritus of a life

crashes the weight of a wake . . .

Act One Scene One:

We search for younger days:

riding a balloon-tire bicycle through the streets

and into fields of dreams

appropriating clichés with reckless abandon . . .

Each day up and out and into the fray

following the yellow brick road

into . . . and beyond . . . the Great Beyond . . .

Masks of pandemics mask stimulus checks . . .

You balk at the thought of yet another move

to quell the restlessness while off script

odysseyites bleed the shoot in a New York minute . . .

Leila Fores

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No, it's not a dress rehearsal, despite your appealing restlessness . . .

The joy of encryption . . . of scrambling the known

as if Tolstoy's spell-check informs your excitement . . .

You enter the painting

and you're on a road . . . waking in the middle of someone's dream . . .

Snow dots the breakdown lane . . .

          How did you get here? . . .

          How did I get where? . . .

          Here, in this backwater backstory . . .

Your coffee mug dusted for prints . . .

The clock texting like crazy . . .

Your queue is flustered and needs a break . . .

Review the fine print if you doubt the algorithm . . .

Odysseyites have grown bored of Marvel Comics;

they're tweaking the turn of events

mounting arguments against the escape hatch in the limelight

of the final scene for all its worth . . .

You're using an online random number generator to pick lines

hoping the answer will pop out of the mishmash . . .

The surface tension with its stuff of days

swings open the doors to a museum of off-color fields

giving you time to recast the worthwhile . . .

Laura Zalenga

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Camo'd savages launch incomprehensible assaults . . .

The nighttime sky ablaze  . . .

Your apprehension . . . wild . . . .

The past's lessons . . . trampled

Where to go?. . .

as threats from identity thieves pierce your consciousness . . .

You try to keep the plates spinning without knowing the when or why

of machines of annihilation . . .

Foot-traffic chokes the passing lane . . . 

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You follow the lead's decent into raw ambition

to test your stick-to-itiveness . . .

memories of odysseyites piggyback . . .

The play-by-play . . . hyperreal . . . surreal

as if staged in a black box theater

by actors retooling the script on short notice

under a drone's jaundiced eye . . .

The director-cum-auteur, yes? . . .

Intransigents upstage the takeaway

with bolded scribbles on yellow legal pads

as the conceit fractures

with sleepovers and makeovers and takeovers

within walking distance of the spot marked X

while you rehearse the missing pages

with temps who couldn't care less . . .

Leila Fores

My poem, Cataloguing the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, was a finalist from among 735 entries in the 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase International Poetry Contest. Bravo to the other poets, & many thanks to curator Bob Sharkey & his team for a super event!

Cataloging the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Bernini saw it in three-dimensions -
head thrown back, eyes half-closed, lips parted.
Tons of marble floating.

Cataloging the ecstasy of Saint Teresa
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.

Saint Teresa in Ecstasy by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini

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Why spend this late hour worrying?

The sink drains and you are among the ancients . . .

You are the ancients

headed for the disaster of the unknown . . .

On the road, hands cupped

you find a box filled with moments

of astonishing pleasure . . .

You crack open a can of words . . .

It's not too late

despite the chagrin

on the faces of your stubbed hammertoes . . .

Forget them . . .

The sink finally drains and you breathe in deeply . . .

This day of blueberry jam

of busy bird feeders

sharpened pencils

stoked fire

rescue cats curled in sleep

is here . . . is now

the Jeep warming despite the cold

the trip down the mountain

for ingredients to make grandmother's goulash . . .

It will be OK . . .

There's nothing but a memory

to lay down a dry fly

onto the roiling surface

for a maybe . . . 

a moment of astonishing pleasure maybe . . .

catch and release . . . catch and release . . .

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          from then and now

A slew-footed nomad in the checkout line

at the grocery store

just in from a grand plié

lays out lines from Wuthering Heights

or something or other

from one of the sisters Brontë

catapulting you with some sort of Trojan Horse 

into the heather moorlands

with odysseyites who for whatever reason are candying

the ins and outs of pulling U-ies

in front of the camera

grandstanding the last vestiges of roundabouts . . .

Then the illusion . . . and footsteps . . .

You follow them out the door

into a cloud bank from both sides

taking you back to a still life . . .

The teller serializes the ups and downs

of this and that for no apparent reason . . .

The inevitable does not disappoint . . .

You lose yourself in what was lost

reminiscing the unlined and untamed

channeling the shadow in the mirror . . .

falling through the window

into a landscape of porcelains

smuggled centuries ago by traders along the Silk Road . . .

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Why bother the nontrivial effort to traverse text? . . .

The rom-com abandoned in a shopping cart snowstorm

with footnotes on nonergodic literature

where your only responsibilities

are eye movement and the turning of pages . . .

You continue . . . reading . . .

Iterations abound . . . and are important, yes? . . .

Taking it down a notch

much to the surprise of graveyard shift hackers . . .

the gate opens to a railroad flat

where one summer morning

you tried out various yoga positions

from a book you had found under the seat of a rental . . .

That was enough to feed odysseyites

around a fire pit later that evening

shepherding secondhand embarrassment

for the perfect balance between carefulness and carelessness . . .

Wendy Bevan

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Trying to come up with the most legible story line

to make it all make sense

the Cartesian coordinates for the remains of our days

pages from a flipbook

stuck to the ceiling of a makeshift hut

in a remote area of consciousness . . .

An idea of who you are and what you will be . . .

How now the edited endgame? . . .

As if you have become a blustery winter wind

a tetchy iconoclast

waiting in lines increasingly bottlenecked

shelves orphaned

cranking the engine of false starts

in a monochromatic world

amenable to dropdown menus of altered egos . . .

Then of course there's the perfunctorily

fact-checking name-checking holding forth

as if crossing the River Styx in a kayak . . .

You emerge from the underworld of basements

the protocols of mimes

struggling to voice an objection

to the end-all be-all of all

with a weary sense of satisfying

a tiresome poetic-novelistic balance . . .

The augmentations should be refreshed post-haste . . .

You assume the polar opposite

the driver's seat awaits your strategy

always a welcomed if exasperating experience . . .

Birds of a feather fail . . .

The nonesuch among us are less and less

a gasp of survival

as the climate zooms in

with countless PSAs ignored by the polloi

who immerse themselves in screens

covered in gabardine for the sake of nothing . . .

We have run out of Blue Books

with which to memorialize the streams of consciousness

tricking through the wastelands of now

the idea howled out of the room had it been suggested by 

first-person shooters captured on camera at checkout . . .

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Images of war bully your sleep . . .

The ubiquity of tragedy

of not knowing what's coming

the blur of sadness . . .

above and below

a different kind of sorrow

a different kind of disbelief . . .

You view a world in thrall of bloat

segueing between bouts

of then and now

then and now . . .

the digressive components of grief 

appropriated from rejection slips . . .

Why think otherwise? . . .

Chris Abani