Let’s start with this photo, the comic melodrama in which you, perfectly staged, are wearing a blue pinafore dress, your dark hair gagged in pigtails, mouth heavily lipsticked, cheeks cherubically rouged, your eyes two flashing ovals of abyss-pooling licorice, sweat in silvery beads rolling down your short-skirted legs, collecting in the spaded dimples of your knee-blades, your hands a pair of static birds tied down, mouth bound, and hovering above you the flashback villain of old, caped in a black shawl, top hat tilted rakishly, an oil-slicked handlebar mustache, the villain greedily rubbing his sweat-greased palms together, his entire existence a rapacious glisten, and his primary ambition in life has been reduced to singular malice, to see you run over by the locomotive that will come thundering down the tracks any minute now, any minute … once this happens, he will, he believes, retire from the annals of villainy and adopt a well-respected position that ensconces him into the creased folds of society, society as he sees it, an origami lawn neatly ordered, and here comes the train now, you scream as loud as you can (yet your voice has been rendered dead and screamless by the silent film predicament you find yourself in), and screamless you are run over by the train, THE END flashes in block letters on the back curtain of my closed eyes, my longing eyes, I wish I could mourn this death for a longer time, but this is only the first with many more to come.
John Biscello 