Engraved in the paranthetical shadows
of intensely subjective cinema,
I cited myself,
watching myself,
submerged
in a pooling coven of ghosts
whose bluest breath of want
revived me in fleeting doses.
I knew that if I kept watching
I would go on.
The question then became
not a matter of survival
but rather the dimensions of the screen
and if the film would enjoy a wider release.
Memory
as spectral residue
and gauzy motes
slow-drifting as evidence
and proof
of Time’s passage
moving from nowhere
to nowhere
and in the process
swallowing lives whole.
In the gauzy rectum
of Memory,
perpetrating cosplay
in darkened rooms,
you encounter, in rounded turns
and cursive,
a shadowed cast of masked strangers
and fools,
aligned to moving distances,
through which rarest intimacy is bred
to conspire and seduce.
It was autumn, or late summer. She existed more than half her waking life in the coat-room she called home. At this palace of a department store—she, the coat-check girl, I, the elevator guy. It was a long time ago. We didn’t see ourselves as past due or endangered, maybe couldn’t see beyond the stomach-aches and migraines born of a gnawing and nameless unease. If questions became us, in the way plague claims a hand or foot, we remained answerless in our stupefaction, entropic automatons clocking in each day with a punch and a smile. Inside I was dying slowly. Perhaps that’s why I approached her. My memory of that encounter is vividly olfactory—her rosewater perfume commingled with filmy workingclass sweat, compelling me to breach the sanctum of her coat-room, whereupon I delivered a truly terrible elevator pun about going down, which, much to my surprise, delighted her, and next thing I knew we were
clothes torn skin rented
fucking.
We fucked with the world-ending rhythm of two people who were poor and knew that they’d always be poor. We fucked with clawing vicegrip intimacy, third-class citizens whose visions of richness would remain a glossy mirage and wasted syringe discarded at the edge of a postcard calling to us from a sanitized distance. Amidst a bleating orgy of Technicolor saturation, we screwed the blues into and out of us. Also, we became instant credit and expedient loans for each other’s defaulting, high-interest loneliness. Why did we do this only once? Did we ever talk about what we had done? Did we ever speak to each other again? I can’t say. Memory no longer serves me. Only fiction, and even that is beginning to lose its grip. Lately, though, I find myself returning to that time, and wondering what became of her, but then this line of speculation leads to an even louder question, echoing in a small room—What became of me?
It was autumn, or late summer.
We met in the coat-room she called home
for half her waking life.
She, the coat-check girl,
I, the elevator guy.
We didn’t see ourselves as past-due or endangered
then,
but now, upon reflection…
Something about her rosewater perfume layered
in thick workingclass sweat
drew me in
as I delivered some truly terrible elevator pun
about going down
and next thing I knew we were
clothes torn skin rented
fucking.
We fucked with the world-ending rhythm
of two people who were poor
and knew that they’d always be poor,
we screwed the blues into and out of us,
third-class citizens whose visions of richness
would remain a glossy mirage and syringe
discarded at the edge of a postcard
lying to us from a sanitized distance.
We became instant credit and convenient loans
to each other’s high-interest, defaulting loneliness.
Once, only once.
What became of her, I sometimes wonder,
but more often find myself asking,
in a quiet room where loss echoes loudly,
what became of me?
They
the fable-soaked
and sorrowful
children of the moon
engender shadows
if only to bootleg
the mercury of departure
to trespass lightly.
In the birthing solitude of invention,
memories night-bloom
as cosplay and eulogy
in the flickering séance of cinema,
keeping strange limitless company
to a rounded minimum.
Find me,
she urged,
in a bird-broken sky,
in mottled swills of ink
darkening my want—
Find me,
wherever I am not,
the explicit spreading
of distance
to tease and captivate
Memory’s cosplay
in a subtextual plot.
Memory,
eulogies birthed in reverse,
séance syncing soundly
the cinema of ghosts
with real-time revivals
rounding to fade.
In the bluest breath
of want
we are
ghosts haunting
our own lives
possessed by the mutable
shadows of cinema.
John Biscello 