There’s something
wonderfully laughable
and bluntly paranthetical
about the ghosts that enclose
and become us
as if we were squatters
on vacation in fallout shelters
where rent is permanently waived
to make room for a speculative future
of sustainable haunting.
Memory
as grayscale motive
for cinematic dismemberment.
Fractures and fragments
insinuating a morphic whole,
we puzzle together
the anti-matter
and immaterial aspects
of our lives
in secret rooms barred
to the world at large.
In these rooms,
playing Frankenstein to the basement
of our desires,
we chart and illustrate maps,
cautioning, when necessary–
here there be monsters.
Memory
as night-flowers
blooming jade and jasmine
in fields of intuition.
Old folks bend over backwards
to become children again
listening to the honeyed
sepia fragrance wafting northward,
restoring calm and grace, briefly,
to lives tasted in half-tones
and measureless ebb.
Memory
as eulogies in reverse.
You tell yourself a story,
same as you tell yourself a memory–
the supplest rites
of cosplay and seance
conducted, first person,
in a room of one’s own
naming.
Scraps, tatters, and the deluge of mindfill
flickering, animating, and magnetically assembling
your rumored origins
into chamber cinema–
you, and you alone watching
the graffitied runes of a life,
or many lives,
curated, transcribed, and projected
onto an empathic white whale of a screen,
known to host
and devour
the darkening distance of hours
in real-time.
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.
John Biscello 