Here,
papering over hovel origins
of wounds and silence
with words riveting on and on
and on,
dirty frayed bandages
panting staccato and weary in the wind,
yet never losing voice,
nor the canopied capacity for mime
in the manic solitude of invention.
Clouds,
fleecy in glaring mass–
softly, softly,
the words avail themselves
to silence in passing.
I could not stare into anyone’s eyes too long. It was like staring openly at the sun. The light was too much to bear. Not to mention, within the stunning field of light projected from eyes were congealed specks and motes of shame, melancholy, longing … so much more. The eyes were ports for so much more. The eyes also bear a strong form of jazz. The notes and rhythms interweave and flood my eyes looking. My eyes looking at other eyes looking at me: a dizzying and disorienting foreplay. Foreplay not as precursor to sex but rather the intimacies of childhood’s inheritance revealed in eyelock. In eyelock we meet and look away even when still looking at. We look away within. Then the eyes follow suit. Sometimes they don’t and you go deeper and foreplay leads to frictive rubbing of tenderest wounds. The eyes beacon aspects of self—hidden, remote, sublime—high-wattage, and it goes into me, a sudden jolt and subtext, and I slip 20,000 leagues under sea change and moveable dark. Once I sink, I want to keep sinking, I want to stay there. I savor the absolute dark and silence as siblings holding me, cradling me, I go aaahh quietly, I sigh and glow softly. The eyes, in their staggering catalog and source material surplus, are a lot to digest.
The author in me
died a lonely
long-time-ago death.
He was too singular
to adapt and stay alive
in this new-moving world
of word-species
and endangered text.
What is it we’ve done? What is it you’ve done? Mark it down. Make an inventory of jottings that concretize and confirm your fleeting form of being. How did you wake? What was it like sleeping? These happenings these adventures and intrigue, these escapades, this collected litany of reflections. A record of you-doing, you-dreaming, you-reflecting-you in time. In this so-called track of time. Get off the train. Get off the tracks. Go trackless. When you begin charting what you cannot remember, what you don’t see or hear, what is unreflected … then you’ve got something. Then you’ve got a radical departure from the norm and orthodoxy of chronicles. Chronicles, as drawn from Chronos, God of Time, and Chronos enters like stunning pellets of pinched light in your memoryless chambers. Where memory does not go, Chronos settles. Chronos roots and incubates there. Chronos makes a whole lot of time out of blank spaces. Chronos feasts on the glaring blank, the digestibly appetizing dark. Time has no time for time-outs. Time is a crime waiting to be apprehended. It is a felon with a seemingly endless track record. Round and round. A felon in a whirlpool, in the suck of a magnetic vacuum. Chronicles gather our disparate pieces into something resembling an inventory. It’s all extremely limited and small-sighted … but it’s something. Something passes the time. Something after another after another … to pass the time. Yet as the old saying goes—nothing eases the passing of time, not even the passing of time.
Monkeys in a dark room, the darkness reeking of lice and mold, the only light coming from the beaconing cherry glow of the cigarettes sticking out of the monkeys’ humpty-hump mouths, typewriters thrill the silence with cacophonous clacking, each and every monkey is each and every other monkey, that is they are working as hive organism, collective and creative tribe to write Hamlet, or something Hamlet-like, could be Hamnet, could be Hamlet in Oz, could be Ham on Rye, they will keep banging away on their instruments until a tinny bell rings (a jingle of a bell you might find in the opening/closing aria of a door in an old-fashioned diner), when the bell rings the monkeys will stop typing and a man wearing an oversized pinata of a parakeet head and a pearl-gray suit and dark tie will come and collect the pages, take them away to a cloistered space, sift through the material, and try to organize the fragments into Hamlet or something Hamlet-like. The monkeys never leave the room. They smoke incessantly (their supply of cigarettes endless). Their shadows have become them, and they have become other in merging with these shadows, their own and others. Several of the monkeys wear hats, but that’s neither here nor there. They wear hats because it gives them a sense of time, place, fashion, and it goes with the typewriters and cigarettes. These monkeys only exist, it seems, because people keep asking—Did you hear the one about monkeys in a room producing Hamlet on typewriters? Some theoretical speculations, when lasting and repeatable, grow limbs, fur, and theoretical offspring closely resembling their parents blank faces.
Slow burn opens us up to possibilities. It is a birthing method. Slow burn brings with it the feels and the feels sets off vibrato trembles in our bones and deepdown. We bugleforth blessings. A long sentence begets slow burn. Nights dreaming of other nights equates to slow burn. That girl from childhood, that jelly-floating avatar of innocence and ouch … slow burn. Slow burn can give you the keys to both arson and fire-channeling. Arson is when you are amateur, immature, out of control, or have not yet developed control. Fire-channeling is on the road to mastery. It is when the Fool and the Magician merge hospitably and fluently.
Who lost, what found? What lost, who found?
The world is an endless complex of lost and found. You lose dead skin. Hair follicles take to the sky in ghostly wisps. You excrete today’s breakfast, you ingest animal fat and spirulina at lunch, voyages are undertaken on inspired whims. Where are you going? Why? Apparently it’s to learn. It is to expand. It is to lose oneself in unexpected scenarios, facades, and strangers’ lives swaddling yours like thrift store blankets. You find strangers. You become lovers. You lose yourself in a stranger-lover, you burn calories (they are lost) when engaging flesh to flesh with the stranger-lover, and two days come and go, and you are gone, the stranger’s gone, loss becomes the storyline, that’s how you find a new storyline in which to lose yourself related to loss. This is the way of the world, the simulcast walkabout of being. We traffic in way stations of lost and found. Gone today, here tomorrow. Like that.
I am here while I went there. Both things are true. Physically you walked to a place, a tangible and specific location, while mentally and psychically you went elsewhere, you traveled to a different, phantasmal, non-location. You can be in two places at the same time. Or three. Or four. It is a matter of, a) splitting off and trusting your multi-dimensional capacity for defection, and, b) embracing proliferation as both travel guide and modes of departure. The expanded perspective and widening umbrella of simultaneity. A pilgrim’s progress measured in streams not miles. A pilgrim’s progress measured in modes not miles. You really are a moveable feast of varying perspectives and multi-dimensional flair. Once you own this, you will travel here, there, everywhere with alternative roads less traveled consolidated into a single dependable path.
John Biscello 