Engraved
in the shadows of cinema
I found myself
watching myself
circled by ghosts
whose bluest breath of want
revived me
in mercurial doses.
I knew that if I kept watching
I would go on.
The question then
became not a matter of survival
bur rather the dimensions of the screen
and if the film would find company
in wider theatrical release.
Memories
supply ghosts
with their own ghosts
haunting lives yet to come
or recoccur in sundered part.
My mother’s face. What about the rest of her? My mother carried within herself, like the gothic utburd, the dead child of motherless. Motherless lived inside my mother, beside her. In these motherless places dark things grew, which I would liken to, which I am likening to empty swimming pools overrun by weeds and spiky grass sprouting from fissures. My mother was an empty swimming pool, a hollowed-out cavity where swimming was forbidden. When you see a dried-out pool, knowing you can’t swim in it, what do you do? What I did was stare and stare, becoming a pair of haunted eyes, and used my imagination to fill the pool with water, a mirage submerged.
I do not want to see the face of God,
I want to see her mask,
where and for whom it cracked.
These lines hail from a poem, “Claim for the Meek,” written by Bernardo Antwerp. I am specifically thinking of these lines as I think of the mask, the many masks I have modeled, like isolated arias, throughout my life. Different masks for different occasions. Yet when I take off one mask to put on another, my face is not bare. There is another mask beneath the mask covering my face. That is because my mask has a mask, and that mask has a mask. It is an endless supply. Where, then, the face? What, then, is a face?
While I am thinking of masks, I am also thinking about readers, specifically asking this question—Are there readers who still read deeply? Of course there are, is the obvious answer. We, via the web and social media, take in more words, more content than ever before. We are, as the saying goes, at record levels. If we are swallowing, ingesting and consuming at a hyper-accelerated rate, then how deeply are we reading? Are we gleaning, skimming, glossing over, grazing? I am someone who has always read fast and eaten fast. Chances are, I am not processing and digesting in the optimal manner. Yet the hyper-cyber-expedient nature of the world in which I live, the information and image stream which exists as a rising flood, all of this has made me want to stop, reconsider, pause, slow down my speeding train and direct it off the track and to the nearest station for hermitage.
If I give enough thought to this business of masks, where will I end up? Why spend precious time thinking about metaphysical mask-wearing? It is a diversion to keep you busy. We do things to pass the time. Nothing eases the passing of time, not even the passing of time. Someone once wrote that and it remained with me as haunt and refrain. We choose things to pass the time and some of those things are deemed, by society, or by society’s aggregated coherence and agreements, to be more important or worthwhile than others. Writing about the nature and volume of masks is not one of them. Finding out what happened to choose-a-celebrity-name last night, or seeing a well-sculpted Asian woman in a thong and bra conducting her morning workout routine on social media is honeyed enough to draw us in for a taste, three to five seconds of your life is all I ask.
It is inescapable. This I know, and begrudgingly accept. Yet, do I begrudgingly accept it? Or do I just say that because what alternative do I have? I can kick and scream like a five-year-old in the paroxysms of a world-ending tantrum, but this accomplishes nothing, and because I am well-aware that this accomplishes nothing, I do not kick and scream, choosing the line—I begrudgingly accept—and because I have said it (and you have heard it) I believe it. I believe it.
My mother’s face is reflected in the silvery blade of the knife held to her throat. The man holding the blade is my father. Or someone resembling my father. In reality, once upon a time, this happened, but the image of my mother’s face reflected in the knife was superimposed later on. I have revised the knife incident endlessly, and in this latest version, my mother’s face is in the mirror of the knife, her face slim and distorted, a watery ebb, within the condensed frame of knife.
This is inescapable: The image, my journeys within placelessness that have become wearisome, dull, drained of vim. Is this what happens before it happens, it? No. I’d say not. No. Because questions are still being asked, because the words continue to rattle around as company within this matchbox, placeless, inescapable. The irony about a matchbox: it is dark inside, yet you are surrounded by an inventory of latent light.
You send yourself letters endlessly. They are postmarked from the future, some future date, some invented date, or the dates are all over the map—future and past switch places like Tuesday and Thursday, or Sunday and Monday. That is to say, not every Tuesday is actually Tuesday. Thursday swapped places with Tuesday, but because you have accepted at face value, have embraced with benumbing metronomic regularity that Tuesday is always Tuesday, you do not realize when Thursday has taken Tuesday’s place. It looks like Tuesday, acts like Tuesday, slots in between Monday and Wednesday just as Tuesday would, yet it is not Tuesday. It is Thursday in disguise, in drag. The letters you send to yourself may not originate from where you think they do. The past and future are mysterious counterparts. Every invention is a non-sequitur, and an invitation to reconsider your angle of perception. For example, remember that old nursery song: Rock-a-bye baby/on the treetop/when the wind blows/the cradle will rock/when the bough breaks/the cradle will fall/down will come baby/cradle and all.
Why was this baby put in a treetop? How tall is the tree? Let’s assume that the treetop is fairly high, why post a cradled baby there? Who are the parents? What kind of parents would do this? If ordinary human parents, did they have to climb the tree, bearing the cradle, and set it in the treetop? Doesn’t that seem like a difficult task to complete? And again, why do it? What if these parents weren’t ordinary humans, but a winged or levitating species of human no longer with us? Or perhaps they weren’t human parents at all, but birds, and the baby was a flightless baby bird, in its nest-cradle, which came crashing to the ground. Or, if human, what happened to the baby? If down came baby cradle and all, did the cradle smash to pieces upon impact, was the baby badly injured, did the baby die? That which is soothing is oftentimes haunting. Or creepy. It is the melodious drug lulling into a false sense of security, peace, a cataleptic state.
Do not trust the letters you send to yourself. They are the fiction upon which broken cradles and false Tuesdays are built.
In the shadow-carved cinema of memory,
its mortuary and altars,
the gauzy feting of ghosts,
alluring you with the promise
of exits and second lives.
Follow our unbearably light drift,
they montone in surround-sound stereo,
we will provide you the necessary air
and amnesty for your overripened longing
and ache.
Leave your body behind.
Leave it to us.
We are the solutions to freight and conundrum.
Chorus:
the bluest breath of want
pools inside every human
as residual plague
and laughable throb.
Memories
as ghosts of cinema,
seeking host-bodies to inhabit,
equal measures possession and vacancy,
they are the ghosts of ghosts,
pulsing in chords of reptition
and bottomless hunger
to freight.
You are being crafted and curated
right now, as you speak.
Scraps of filmreel flickering and bringing to life
shadows of a life lived,
echoes of fiction bygone.
Memory as the green-screen slate
upon which cinema is perpetrated.
Behind the scenes, there are more scenes.
Behind the ghosts, further ghosts.
Knowing this, isn’t it better to drift?
To become a drifter
in magnetic tow to the graffitti
and seance of stars,
a captive in fasting thrall
to time regained in fleeting doses
of swoon and ache.
John Biscello 