One Good Word Deserves Another

Posted on September 23, 2026 by John Biscello
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You Not There (triptych)

Posted on September 23, 2026 by John Biscello

1.

Can you imagine your life without you in it? I can. And cannot. Can and cannot, because when I am not there, who is doing the saying, who the authoring, who or what the voice? You must imagine yourself from all angles, in this case gone from your life, yet the narrator, the voice, continues to go on and on about your life. It has something to say whether you are there or not. It continues whether you are a ghost, a rumor, a zombie, an avatar … choose your calling or guise, it doesn’t matter. The voice, in its power of unlimited speech, eclipses your personal ending every time.

2.

Imagine that you are not there. You are no longer taking up primary residence and occupancy in this thing called your life. You are gone. Yet you hear echoes spanning an archive. A voice, an existential device, a neutral orator, speaks on your behalf, in Memoria. You get to outlive your death, outlast your ending, which is pretty cool. You departing your life did not spell out The End. Imagine yourself talking about yourself to someone else, not unlike you, but somehow truer, better. A more reliable source. In becoming the witness to the witness, you drift a little further away from your so-called life, this drifting both glacial and cinematic. It would serve you well to remember that: the drifting is both glacial and cinematic.

3.

Imagine your life without you in it, or imagine your life without your life, it seems impossible, how can one imagine such a thing, doesn’t the exclusion and evisceration of you consequently preclude the imagining, the capacity for imagining? No. You must imagine beyond those limits. We are pushing you beyond your comfort zone, we know.  We are asking you to become you-less just long enough to experience what might become a revelation. Or a waste of time. Subjectivity is in the I of the beholder.

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Q.

Posted on September 23, 2026 by John Biscello

Can you imagine your life

without you in it?

An inquiry,

and unwritten obituary,

concerned not with facts,

but with tracking the vividly suspect fiction

of a disapperance

rumored to be happening

in real-time.

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Catalog

Posted on September 23, 2026 by John Biscello

I could not stare into anyone’s eyes too long.

It was like staring openly at the sun.

The light was too much to bear.

Not to mention,

within the stunning freight of light

projected from eyes were congealed

glittering specks and motes bearing

shame, longing, innocence,

volumes more.

My eyes

looking at other eyes

looking at me

made for dizzying

and disorienting foreplay.

Foreplay not as precursor to sex

bur rather the meekest intimacies

of childhood’s inheritance

revealed in eyelock.

In eyelock we meet

and look away

even when still looking at.

We look away within.

Then the eyes follow suit.

Sometimes they don’t

and you go deeper

and foreplay leads to frictive rubbing

of tenderest wounds,

scarry stories to tell in the dark.

The eyes beacon aspects of self

–hidden, remote, sublime–

high-wattage, and it goes into me,

intravenous jolt and subtext,

and I slip 20,000 leagues

under sea change and unmarked wrecks.

Once I sink,

I want to keep sinking,

I want to stay there,

savoring the opiate depths

and sighing aaaaahhh softly.

The eyes, in their staggering catalog

and akashic record,

are a lot to digest.

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The Dreaming You Save May Be Your Own

Posted on September 22, 2026 by John Biscello
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Bardo Noir

Posted on September 22, 2026 by John Biscello

Out/here in/here

cradling the air. Hugging its hot pissy whatever. Something to hold onto something to grasp. This is maintenance at its most base level. If I let go I will be scooped up again/a helpless dollop in timespanning batter.

The batter both bleached and midnightlike/a doughy mountain that heaves and collapses and asks no questions. Dough don’t talk. Manna be mouthless. Mum’s the word. Silence carves and underscores the wafting arabesque spirals of piss n vinegar hook-tugging my nostrils cartoonesque. This world a bloodbath tombtub filling up with dark mysterious matter. Some unnamed is nasty and known. Some unknown. I name things as fast as I can. It is like blowing air into ruptured balloons again and again/never ending rounds of air thinning out and in out and in/blowing nowhere fast. In other words, I can’t name everything. In other words, the same as these words (yet somehow different), I can’t name everything. Variations and classes fail yet nobly attempt. There is a twist to all this. An acidic kinky twist. In mirror only we show off our chromosomal ache. Here our minds are slow to realize the fast track phantoms and grails barreling through and through. It is like looking down the eyeteeth of a loaded shotgun/one of those kapow blooey jobs that leaves brains staining audible walls. I call for someone or something or some other thing. It is some other thing I’ve always wanted/some other thing the nighthawk above my head circling circling redeyed. I keep calling. If only is my mantra and crucifix. They warned me not to long. Do not long, they said repeatedly. It is the surest road to misery. We possess no antidote no cure.

In this respect my roads have grown weary of want. Distances close in on distances and we grow minutely claustrophobic. Subtitles become our cinema as we speak no more or very little. We leak rivulets of light through runny noses and scabless wounds. Crystal clear vapors rising restore me to lucid longing/to sublimities lost.

Do not question or long, they warned. I grow anxious and name things. There is a false quality of forever in this naming. The naming is not memory. It is the opposite of memory. It is mercy applied to mirage-making in the name of safety. I long to return to all things sublime/to move beyond hovel and shrine. But no, you cannot, you are on a mission. I hear this in my head again and again, you are on a mission, the gospel hissing voice reminds me. You are not here to piss on walls or piss off. Your mission is something else. The original instructions and directions have been lost. Yet you must carry on with this thing that’s been named mission. The mission could rate anywhere from high priority to utterly delusional but you must carry on/so go on naming go on longing (even though we warned you) and understand that you are not

falling

you are miming the slo-mo descent

of someone else falling/

theater perpetrated to the point of acute realism

in sets of circumstances and conditions that baffle and befuddle

you the fool

heavenbent on continuance…

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Rabbits

Posted on September 22, 2026 by John Biscello

A fleeting pattern compounded by space-time into a deniable entity. Why a deniable entity? Are some entities inadmissible? What qualifies them as inadmissible? Are they deniable because, at the core, there is nothing definite about them, nothing set in stone? If so, who is doing the denying? A fleeting pattern compounded by space-time … it sounds like a cosmic blender, a mixer. All in all in all is a mash-up. We are crash test dummies consecrating accidents waiting to happen. We bloom as revelations in plotless swaths of time-space, sometimes palsied sometimes fluid, out of formless we come in (and come into many forms). And go out of them too. Is that why we are part of this vernacular and judgment—deniable entities? Our identities dissolve a little every time we forget something, every time our name is not said. We are stories that replicate, reproduce, reform, we as story-core are in the re-prefix business. We are, as far as evidence suggests, inadmissible to the laws of strict and set definitions.

Then there are tachyons—of matter, or no matter—interstitial in their groove and essence. They are, same as they are not—ghosts in the feed, hypothetical glitches. Is Schrodinger’s cat dead, alive, neither, both? If I had an inside-the-box perspective, if my viewing took place inside the darkened cinema of box, my response would be different from my outside-the-box perception. Or does my looking, whether outside or in, bear no consequence whatsoever (except in my empirical placement of self-as-camera in the equation)? If something is neither here nor there, does that mean it’s everywhere? Latent potentialities in fields of dreaming never stop reproducing. They are the copulating rabbits of existence at its luminous core. Light begets light same as answerless questions keep the dark guessing and lucid.  

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False Alarm

Posted on September 21, 2026 by John Biscello

the author in me

died a lonely

long time ago death

(too singular

to adapt and stay alive

in this new-moving world

of word-species

and endangered text)

the author lying

through his teeth

to pardon me

revived

every time the author

uses his tattling mouth

to complete a sentence

running on

apparently forever.

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Waltz

Posted on September 21, 2026 by John Biscello

In the latent vernacular

and trespass

of mind-breaths spanning space-time,

crystallized as rapt intimacies

and wax seal

giving the dreaming-voice

its human due

and proof of residence,

we scratch in lost measure–

I Wuz Here–

followed by the fading tracks

of diminishing returns

within a poem’s ghostly domain

and fathomless fall.

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Forest

Posted on September 21, 2026 by John Biscello

Everyone possesses a dark forest. It is, whether geographically or metaphysically, where you are terrified to wander at night, alone. It is the weathervane and divining rod of primal fear. There is an ancient nameless fear that makes your existence tremble. The trembling is inescapable. As is the frigid hollow in the pit of your being. It’s not what you’ll find or what will find you in the dark forest, it’s what you imagine: the endlessness to the woods, the cannibal hag in the cottage, the headless apparitions, ill-tempered demons, the bottomless bog. Too many prospects and none of them light. Not in a dark forest. Not when your mind is populated by an All Hallow’s gallery of what-ifs, and you find that the child that you were, and have always been, fevers desperately to invent a bed under which to hide in plain sight.

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