Monkeys and Barrels

Posted on October 6, 2026 by John Biscello

   None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while. Both things were true. Both could be beginnings. So let’s go with both: None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while.

I felt like a dehydrated man wandering aimlessly in a wasteland of publishing. To clarify: the publishing industry being the wasteland. Then, a chance. A dehydrated man wandering aimlessly in a desert lives for chances. Which is why the tease of mirages prove to be the death of many.

   Anyway, a chance: I had an appointment with the V.P. of the big publisher C.C. Burton. My friend, Lana, a fellow writer, who always backed and supported my work, had wrangled the appointment with Elaine, the V.P., who was an old friend of hers.

   Elaine, like myself, was of Italian-American heritage. Elaine, like myself, was from Brooklyn. And because my novel was a crooked valentine to the Brooklyn of my youth, Lana thought that it might be a perfect fit for Elaine’s sensibility. It sounded promising. Most mirages do. They glitter in the daytime and disappear in the twilight. Of course, it’s always twilight when you arrive at the mirage. I’m sure Einstein could explain it. Anyway, the meeting.

   I stepped into Elaine’s posh office. I saw a smallish woman dressed in a pale lavender suit seated behind a massive desk. Her hair was sculpted high. I wondered if she had sculpted it with Aqua Net. Was there still Aqua Net? Had it been banned by the Ozone Commission? My grandmother had petrified her hair on a daily basis with Aqua Net. My grandmother was long dead. Not because of the Aqua Net, mind you. Elaine appeared to be in her late fifties, early sixties. Definitely of the Aqua Net generation.

   Mister Fillameno, Elaine said, please sit down.

   I sat down in a wooden chair, facing her. I felt as if I were at the principal’s office, and was about to be reprimanded for something I had done wrong in class. Which was often how I felt. Especially when seated across from vice presidents with sculpted hair and lavender suits. Which was not often.

   Elaine and I chatted. About Brooklyn. About no longer living in Brooklyn (I had expatriated to Nine Peaks, a small town in New Mexico, twenty years ago). We chatted about this and that, a casual volley, which led to my novel. And why she was passing on it.

   You’re obviously a very talented writer, she said, and then highlighted what she loved about the book—the characters were incredibly nuanced and layered, particularly Anya in her tragic sadness. Yet, and it was a big yet—YET—the novel is too short to publish, especially by an unknown author. She needed a novel with more meat on its bones, more heft and bulk, if she were going to peddle it.

   I don’t remember if she actually used the word peddle but that’s what I heard—peddle. Which made me think of hot dogs peddled by vendors at Yankee Stadium. Or a BMX racer with glow-in-the-dark-pedals. Elaine went on about pacing, character development, length, which then tied into prevailing marketing trends, and that’s when I cut her off.

   I don’t write for the market. I write for the angels. And for God.

   Where had that come from? I had never thought of myself as writing for the angels. And God. But it felt true when I said it.

   I could tell Elaine didn’t like being cut off, especially right in the middle of her dissertation on prevailing marketing trends. She pursed her lips tightly. They grew ashen, then pallid. Mortuary. I thought a touch of lipstick could revive them.

   Lipstickless, Elaine sniped—That is all well and noble, Mister Fillameno, but I can assure you that God isn’t running the market. And he isn’t the one who will publish your books.

   I didn’t know what to say. Elaine had me over a barrel. Was that the right saying? Had me over a barrel? Why a barrel? And wasn’t there something about monkeys and barrels?

   Good luck to you, Elaine clipped, letting me know that our meeting was officially over and I should exit her office.

   I stood up to leave, disoriented. I was still thinking about God and the angels. And monkeys and barrels. I hadn’t yet caught up to the present moment, to what was happening. I was leaving. Was meant to be leaving.

   Good day, sir, Elaine said, as a sort of nudge to get me moving.

    I left Elaine’s office.

   Walked the length of the carpeted hallway.

    To the elevator.

   Took it down to the lobby.

   Walked the marble floor to the glass revolving doors.

   And stepped out onto the teeming daytime sidewalk. I felt as if I had just vacated one dream, and entered another.

   It felt good to be back in New York. It had been a while. And none of it was going anywhere.

   I started walking. I thought of previous rejections of my work, filing through the internalized catalog. Too short. Too long. Too obscure. Too much this, not enough that. It’s always something, as the late great Gilda Radner would gripe. Yes, sir, back in New York. Just another pinballing speck in the shadow of anonymity. In the shadow of monolithic buildings. This made me happy and sad. I wasn’t a young man anymore. Expect I was. Einstein could explain it. 

   You’ve got plenty left in the tank, kid. I often referred to myself, in the third person, as kid. It was a Babe Ruth thing. He called everyone kid, no matter what their age. Apparently because he could never remember anyone’s name.

   Babe Ruth. There was a man who defied the odds. A cigar-smoking, hot dog-gobbling, beer-swilling giant who announced himself to the world as legend.

   Who cares about age, I told myself. There’s no such thing as time anyway. Live as if you’re already dead. Then, and only then, will you come to fully embrace life and experience truer freedom.

   What had happened to me? Somewhere along the way I had lost my nerve. My moxie and chutzpah. Parts of me, perhaps a bit punch-drunk, had gone into hiding. They didn’t want to get hit anymore. I understood. I sympathized with those parts. I had become a dormouse on a ledge. Or a vagrant Buddha standing on the street corner in the rain. Parts of me had.

   Yet today, today something in me, something that had been walled up and dammed, had broken open. I owed it to Elaine. Her passive-aggressive assault on God and the angels. Her faith in prevailing marketing trends. Her use of the word peddle.

I walked the streets of New York that afternoon, feeling pissed off. Feisty. Ready to take on all comers. I felt completely ready to let all my monkeys out of their barrels. Just to see them dance.

Posted in Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sure Shot

Posted on October 6, 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 timepsanning batter and crunch.

The batter both bleached and midnightlike, a doughy hellacious 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. Mania is my talent and bane.

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. 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 eyetooth of a loaded shotgun, one of them kapow blooey jobs that leaves brains staining audible walls and ears ringing.

I call for someone or something or some other thing. It is some other thing I’ve always wanted, some other thing the red-eyed night-hawk circling above my head, and circling, in predatory orbit. I keep calling. If only is my mantra and cruciform. 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. Footfalls scuffed and worn. Distances close in on distances and we grow minutely claustrophobic. Subtitles become our cinema as we speak no more or very little.

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 fable and mercy applied tenderly to mirage-making. I long to return to all things sublime, to move beyond fallout 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. Or perhaps erroneously misplaced. No matter the score, 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, 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, in-and-out of love with live theater perpetrating both the absurd and highly realistic, it’s a swing-thing that requires staying tuned all the way through and around.  

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Swimming Lessons

Posted on October 6, 2026 by John Biscello

My mother’s face. The bladed cheekbones, the dancer’s neck, the crowded eyes. What about the rest of her? My mother carried within herself gothic mass, sclerotic and stillborn, the dead child of motherless. Motherless lived inside my mother, beside her. In these motherless places dark things grew, which I would liken to empty swimming pools overrun by weeds and spiky grass sprouting from cracks and fissures, a hothouse for entropy. My mother was an empty swimming pool, a hollowed-out cavity where swimming was forbidden. When you see a waterless pool, knowing you can’t swim in it, what do you do? What I did was stare and stare, becoming a pair of haunted desperate eyes, and used my imagination to fill the pool with water, a mirage submerged. I cannot count how many times I drowned inside my mother. Or rather inside her motherless places, grip-locked.

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

To No End

Posted on October 5, 2026 by John Biscello

I had a decision to make. The world was ending, again. It had ended several times before. To be more accurate: many worlds had ended many times. Anyway, on one hand, there was the imminent end of the world, a proof of concept with viral streaming capacity. And then there was my desk, where I was sitting. I’d say about 22 1/3 of my life had spent sitting at this desk, and more than half my life had been spent sitting at a desk, many desks compounded into a single archetypal desk. So there I was, sitting at my desk, news of the world ending circulating like toxic motes and mosquito-drone … what was I supposed to do? I did what I had done so many other times before. And hope to keep doing after the world ends again (and again). I wrote. I was rote and habitually ritual in that respect. I sat down at my desk every day and wrote. You say hell is freezing over? Put on your overcoat, pick up your pen, and write about it. Or write about heaven, or purgatory, or childhood, while hell freezes over. A plague is spreading and claiming countless lives, you say? Pray and write. Or don’t pray and write. But write. Writing to me is the energetic equivalent of playing music. I intend to keep making music, come hell or high water, come Amazon disaster or A.I. mindrape. Keep at it. Trust in the words and process, even when the ship is sinking or especially when the ship is sinking. You will die in real-time. Your heart will break in real-time. But your words will resound within timeless. These are not only lyrics to go (nod to the Tribe), but lyrics that go on and on. Same as the music. Same as all creative, life-breeding acts. There is a dizzying limitlessness to the whole thing. You will die within the enclosure of strict limits. You are immortal within limitlessness. The world is ending (again). Its glaciers carving scythes. There is a tag slated for your big toe. Gravity is prattling on about morass and void, its two favorite words. The world is ending. Okay, then: can you sit at your desk and complete a sentence? Good. Can you add a sentence to the first one, and then another? Excellent. Soon you have a paragraph. Can you keep doing this, your desk anchored and aligned to the greatest moveable feast you will ever know, hatched from words that dream and dance to no end. Think about that. Words dancing and dreaming to no end in a world ending. The world ends. The words don’t. The dancing don’t. The dreaming don’t. Stack your don’ts into a creative yes. A resounding yes. That is why I am sitting here at this desk, writing. I have made my decision for today. Tomorrow’s decision is worlds away.

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Accompanying Tune

Posted on October 5, 2026 by John Biscello

In this mutable and concave room, this purveyor of nimbus and cradle, shapeshifting occurs at a phenomenal rate. The room alters its dimensions, and I in turn am altered. It is reciprocal harmony and symbiotic intimacy. The room is significantly empathic. It tunes to me, my needs, my secret and deep-down longing. From this raw and fetal material, means for travel and modes of departure are arrived at. The room is the ultimate agency for travel, specifically for what you might call placeless travel, hard-wired to my wants and desires. In this regard, the room is a genetic whisperer and mind-reader. It knows exactly what to say and do. It is, in an abstract sense, the double of my autobiography. It has traversed lengths of me I have yet to go to, or reach, parlaying reconnaissance into a customized road map. I can leave the room, but really I’m never outside it, because the room remains inside me always, and I it. There is the physical space defined as “the room,” but there is also the metaphysical character of the room that is inside me. The physical room can be exited, but not the metaphysical one. Where would it go? Where would I go? I would leave the room only to end up right back inside the room. Is it all the same room? Or is it a different one I enter after exiting? The only answer I’ve come up with so far regarding that: same same different.

I suspect that the room, unlike my organism, is immune to entropy. It is a room that, if vacated, would simply relocate. It would go where it was needed, and attach itself accordingly. I know this much—without the room, I would not have been written by the author who has obsessively stalked me since childhood. I used to think of this author not as author, but as a panther or wolf whose sole objective was to catch and devour me. I figured I was the Road Runner to its Wile E. Coyote. And in never getting caught, this Roadrunner-Coyote analogy only deepened and solidified. Then I realized it was no wild animal wanting to devour me, it was an author that wanted to track my every move so as to keep me written, to contain me as existential proof and test study. Since birth, or more than likely before birth (as I believe this author’s stalking preceded my delivery date into this world, the akashic length of karmic stalking, if you will), I was assigned an author, and that author would need a room in which he, I, it could exist in a mad lab of co-habitation. I was part of an ongoing equation. They say the demons have a harder time tracking you down if you keep moving. I kept moving but also I was inside the room that was inside of me. In other words, I went nowhere. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The room provided plenty of space for both travel and staying put. Or I should say the travel of staying put. In this respect, the more put you stayed, the further you traveled, or could travel. These were the governing principles and basic physics of the room. It took me many years to understand this. And I still can’t say I really understand it. Mostly I’ve acclimated to it. I am, as always, inside this room, being written and unfinished. Unfinishable. This thorny incompleteness keeps me musing on both the room and its author as accompanists to solitude.

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Life of a Professional Stand-In

Posted on October 2, 2026 by John Biscello

Since I was young I have been seeking permission to exist. This I have sought from a variety of sources. And not just any permission to exist, it had to be formal permission, perhaps an official document, or permission bestowed from an authority figure, some behind-the-scenes wizard who would present me with an all-access certificate. The permission couldn’t come from a friend or lover, that wouldn’t stick or hold, wouldn’t “take” as the saying goes. The permission had to come from someone who wouldn’t easily grant that sort of permission, their permission-giving had to be issued with a high degree of reluctance, stinginess, they had to be parsimonious when dispensing permission. I always imagined there was document floating out there somewhere with my name on it, and the header, Permission to Exist, printed in bold block letters. Why do I seek this permission? What does it mean, or entail? Is it somehow connected to a deep down need for ultimate forgiveness? Forgiveness for what? Being born? As if some gremlin voice had told me at a very young and impressionable age—You shouldn’t have been born, but since you were, you’d better do everything you can to earn your right to exist, though you will never be granted that right.

I’d say this plague of permission-to-exist was one of the main reasons I became a stand-in. I encountered a professional stand-in when I was visiting Tokyo. I was out walking with my friend, Saki, who saw one of her girlfriends, Mai, sitting outside a café, eating ice cream with a man. Mai and Saki chatted a bit, introductions were circulated (the man was Kenta), and later, when Saki and I were alone and I referred to Kenta as Mai’s boyfriend, Saki laughed and said Kenta wasn’t her actual boyfriend, but a stand-in playing the role of her boyfriend, as Mai was going to meet a high school friend of hers and her friend’s fiancé, and Mai didn’t want to show up alone. She had hired Kenta to play her boyfriend for the occasion. I knew about the concept of the stand-in through Japanese films, but it was the first time I had ever experienced it in person. And immediately knew this was the job I wanted, or that was best-suited to my disposition. I was not interested in living my own life, or trying to assemble and construct a life and identity that I was responsible for managing and maintaining. It was too hard, too exhausting to hold an identity together in its compact bundle of existential components, and to convince others of that identity, to have that identity mix and mingle and become part of an endless interplay. And it was especially difficult when you have little to no conviction that such an identity is real or lasting. As I saw it, an identity was a trap with lots of built-in advertisements and slogans trying to convince you that it isn’t a trap, but something essential and necessary. Having to do something to confirm, substantiate, and continually prove to myself that I am this so-called identity, or that I am these things, but not those things, this dishonest calculus of affirmation and negation being leveraged … to what end?

   I have been a stand-in for a little over a year now. Mostly through word-of-mouth, my gigs have grown, both in number and variety. I’ve attended funerals on behalf of absentees, delivered packages, appeared as a delegate at parties. Recently, I was a stand-in for a break-up. I met the woman at the café, and explained to her that I was there to break up with her on behalf of her boyfriend. I had memorized the finer points of what he told me to express in ending the relationship and delivered a choppy monologue, but it wasn’t long before I was speaking freely and spontaneously based on the woman’s reactions and engagement. It amazed me how she went from being completely shocked and dismayed by my role, to not only accepting but embracing who or what I represented, as she poured out grief, anger. disappointment, and emotional backlog in a nearly one hour session. I was a receptable who took none of it personally. Without any intimate attachment or investment, I found it surprisingly easy to fulfill the role of target and scapegoat. In this cherished role of stand-in, I no longer seek permission to exist. I am beyond grateful to have no life to call my own.

Posted in Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Mama Said Knock You Out

Posted on October 2, 2026 by John Biscello
Posted in Poetry, Prose, Video | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Golgotha Revisited

Posted on October 2, 2026 by John Biscello

Let’s imagine it like this: The man on the cross is not Jesus. The man crucified was a stand-in. A strategic measure. Part of a grand design and plan coordinated by the Twelve Apostles and Jesus. It was an inside job. The crucified man sacrificed himself for the cause. He played the role of Jesus, he endured the agony of crucifixion for the sake of renaissance. It was a look-alike, a double who had taken the fall. Did Mary Magdalene know, was she in on it? What about Mary? Were they kept in the dark? Who exactly was privy to this revolutionary ruse and gambit? The idea was for many to witness the demise of Jesus on the cross, and then, three days later, the real Jesus would emerge, reborn, unkillable, flexing and asserting his immortality and sanctifying his title as the Son of God. There is nothing more epic than life-after-death stories, nothing that captures the imagination with such zest and intrigue. This strategy would stack the odds in favor of a mass following, or cult-like influential sway. Conscious and enlightened zombies make for the greatest showmen. Jesus’s ultimate message was true and sincere, he really did want to spread the illuminated gospel of kindness and charity, yet how to get more followers? It was, then as it is now, a promotional issue and marketing challenge. The Apostles became a secret P.R. team. Jesus had to bring death back from beyond the grave, death had to publicly reintegrate with life. You could say the man in Golgotha was the fool on the hill. He was The Fool willing to take the plunge into a tomorrowless void for the sake of a cause he believed in. Faith became him in an anonymous whisper. The Apostles were well-versed in resurrection myths. They had guidelines to follow. Osiris would be a model of inspiration. Comebacks are the backbone of mythology. Myths don’t die, they are recycled. Repurposed. The illusion of witnessing Jesus’s death would start a revolution. They knew it was the tinder they needed to start the right kind of fire. The holy fire. They felt justified and supremely righteous in their aims and intent. The staging of a death was just as powerful, if not more powerful, than an actual death. Jesus didn’t die for your sins or mine. He died, theatrically, in order to return and claim a seat of power, become an ambassador with generational sway. Groucho Marx once said, Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? That line of logic could be reinterpreted and applied to that crisis in Golgotha. The man you saw on the cross was not the man you saw on the cross. I say saw, because you were there, weren’t you? A swirling patter of nameless ions, migrant specks of dust, the anti-matter of an endless dream. You saw what I saw, what so many saw, or believed they saw. It’s been said that the greatest trick the devil ever played was getting the world to believe he didn’t exist. Even greater was Jesus’s trick of getting the world to believe he stopped existing, only to return three days later, clean and well-lighted.

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Inner Life of Not Enough

Posted on October 2, 2026 by John Biscello
Posted in Poetry, Prose, Video | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Pop Quiz

Posted on October 1, 2026 by John Biscello

It was not enough, never enough. The ghosts were bottomless in their hunger, and legion. This sense of not-enough had plagued and subliminally influenced me for as long as I can remember. Not-enough was the ultimate mindfuck and midwife because it helped give birth to a slipstream of orphans. Not-enough was the unscratchable itch way down deep in my existence. You cannot scratch where your existence is. Or, how to scratch existence? Existential itches are unscratchable.

I was a young man once with young man’s dreams. I am an older man now, with young man’s dreams. The dreams haven’t changed. I am amazed that I still carry the vision and drive of that young man who imagines he is on a fevered quest, a mission, devoted to a calling. That has not left me. That has not changed. Is the mission somehow bound and wrapped up in not-enough? This insatiable desire to become a great writer, as if one day a specific goal-post will be reached, and ding-ding-ding, I will be coronated Great Writer, status will be officially confirmed, I will be stamped, I will have been inducted into the ranks, and I will let out the largest fire-filled sigh of finally.  Having written novels, plays, poems, screenplays … not enough. Never enough. Will Great Writer status be enough? Would success beyond my wildest dreams qualify as enough? Not-enough is tough to swallow and impossible to ignore. It grows and grows. It is the crow cawing nevermore. Nevermore lingers hauntingly in your internal core, it roosts and assumes residence there, and you want to silence nevermore, want to evict it, but it crows on and on, the sibilant whispering of dark flood rising to the mass of tidal.

Not-enough might have been planted in you from a very young age, or from a past life or lives or all of the above, a karmic and compound rotation … not-enough proliferated like weeds and echoes in the sound-garden of your dark. That, or I see a two people, each scrawling a message again and again on their own respective chalkboards: 1. You are not enough, 2. You are enough, and the messages wind up canceling each other out, leaving you sick and tired of you as the subject, you as the host and platform for meditations and musings on enough and not-enough.

If I write about not-enough enough will it be exposed? Will print and exposure settle the matter and rid me of this scourge? I don’t know. I-don’t-know and not-enough have been the two most influential figures in the society of my inner life. Maybe I should get a T-shirt with I Don’t Know printed on the front, and Not Enough on the back. Maybe that would alleviate this need for writing about what I don’t know about not-enough.

Posted in Poetry, Prose | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment