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…