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

Airway

Posted on October 1, 2026 by John Biscello

Not-enough crawled out of me, an avatar wearing night-goggles caked in frost. It was an amateur when it came to daylight. Not-enough spends most of its life in nocturne, embedded crablike in a grotto: unseen, unheard. Which is why I am attempting in my own clumsy and naïve way to be scrupulous and votive when it comes to essaying the unseen and unheard. Not-enough was frequently overlooked, left to its own dark devices and motives, and I wanted to modify that relationship. The seen and heard were often, not always, but often the visual-physical manifest, the freighted collective, in disguise, of the unseen unheard. In this regard, the world of appearances was composed predominantly of symptoms. Symptoms had become the masked face and surrogate anatomy of many and much, people were not living lives anymore they were living symptoms, or you could say they were living the symptomatic side-effects of living. In other words (and there are always other words for the words we have or imagine we have): Not-enough was running the show. People were not aware that not-enough was running the show, or running their lives. Yet that was not my primary concern, nor should it be. My business concerned my not-enough. Not-enough had authored many works for me, had driven me to drink and drug, to fornicate in a revolving door series of one-night stands … not-enough functions as the petty and spiteful white-wigged governor, the Napoleonic mafia boss running shit from down below, from deep within, its pulpit both crow’s nest and fallout shelter. Except wasn’t this me portraying and conveying not-enough as such? I needed to redefine the dynamics of our relationship. Not-enough doesn’t need more. Its appetite is bottomless so giving it more is the same as giving it nothing at all. You don’t order take-out for a tapeworm. A waste of time, energy, and resources. What to do instead? I gave not-enough some air. Some breathing room. It was like watching a micro-goblin emerge blinkingly into the light. Not-enough, despite its name and title, doesn’t actually need anything. Or very little. Space, air, light. And these words. I give not-enough these words because I am attempting to chronicle and narrate the secret life of not-enough, give its story of ventilation proper passage. Enough about me, and more about not-enough. Or something to that effect.

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

Mission Impossible

Posted on September 29, 2026 by John Biscello
Posted in Audio, Cinema, Poetry, Prose, Video | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Stand-In

Posted on September 29, 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 permission to exist, it had to be formal permission, perhaps an official document, or permission bestowed from an authority figure, someone who I rate above me or somehow more important. The permission had to feel significant or meaningful. Let’s say a girlfriend granted me permission to exist, it wouldn’t stick or hold, wouldn’t “take” as the saying goes. The permission had to hail from someone who typically wouldn’t grant that sort of permission, someone who would withhold or leverage such permission-giving. The permission had to come from someone who refused to grant it. I imagined there was some document floating out there with my name on it, and the header, Permission to Exist, in bold block letters. Why do I seek this permission? Is it somehow connected to a deep down need for ultimate forgiveness? Forgiveness for what? For being born? As if some gremlin voice had told me You shouldn’t have been born, but since you were, you’d better do everything you can to earn your right exist though you will never be granted that right.

This plague of permission-to-exist led to my becoming a stand-in. I was going to say professional stand-in, but I do not get paid. In that respect, I am an amateur stand-in. I met a professional stand-in when I was visiting Japan. I was out walking with my friend, Saki, who saw one of her girlfriends, Ai, sitting outside a café, eating ice cream with a man. Ai and Saki talked a bit, introductions were circulated (the man was Naoko), and later, when I referred to Naoko as Ai’s boyfriend, Saki smiled and said Naoko wasn’t Ai’s real boyfriend, he was a stand-in playing the role of her boyfriend, as she was going to meet a high school friend of hers and the friend’s fiancé and didn’t want to show up by herself. It was the first time I had encountered a stand-in in real life (I had seen it several times in films). The idea intrigued me. It was almost a year later when I decided to become a stand-in. I put up flyers, printed business cards, and the information was kept cryptically simple: Male Stand-In Available for All Occasions (No Charge) and my phone number. I received a number of calls from people who wanted to know what a stand-in was and what I was actually offering. I also received plenty of calls from the mentally unbalanced set. Eventually, I got a few gigs, pretty basic ones. I attended a funeral in someone’s stead, went to a party, delivered a package. Through word of mouth, my gigs grew, both in number and variety. I was the stand-in for a break-up. I met the woman at a café, and explained to her that I was there to break up with her on behalf of her boyfriend. I had memorized what he had told me to express and delivered the speech, but soon I was operating and speaking freely and spontaneously based on the woman’s reactions and engagement. It amazed me how she went from being completely shocked by my role and what I had come to say and do, and then not only accepting but embracing who or what I represented and pouring out her grief, anger, disappointment, and emotional messiness in a nearly one hour session. I was a receptacle who took none of it personally. Without any personal investment or attachment, I found it easy to fulfill the role of target and scapegoat.

I am not interested in living my own life, or trying to assemble and construct a life that I am responsible for managing and maintaining. It’s too hard to hold an identity together, to convince others of that identity, to have that identity mix and mingle and become part of an endless interplay, and it’s especially hard when you have little to no conviction that such an identity is real or lasting. As I see it, identity is a trap with lots of built-in advertisements and slogans trying to convince you that it isn’t a trap, but something important and necessary. Identity is not 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 and unstable calculus of affirmation and negation being leveraged … to what end? As a stand-in, I become whatever someone else needs for a little while. That is part of the allure. It is only for a little while. It’s like putting on a pair of clothes, and then taking off that pair of clothes. I do not stay in the clothes. This life as an amateur stand-in suits me fine. The amateur part is also key. No money is exchanged. I feel as if I am providing a service to people. I am making myself useful. I think that circles back to and connects with my permission-to-exist disease. I imagine that in a very straightforward way—I allow myself to exits for others, briefly, a surrogate and unpaid rental who will accommodate the needs and wants of others. I am beyond grateful to have no life to call my own.

Posted in Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment