In the gauzy rectum
of Memory,
perpetrating cosplay
in darkened rooms,
you encounter, in rounded turns,
a shadowed cast of masked strangers
and fools,
aligned to moving distances
closer,
and through which rare intimacy
is bred to conspire
and seduce.
Memory,
eulogies birthed
in reverse,
seance syncing soundly
the cinema of ghosts
with real-time revivals
rounding to fade.
She, as in ghosts,
as in white-hot incubi
with a seductive glassy
not there stare
that bewitches and allures,
bearing melancholy freighted
with scraped knees, mirror shards,
and broken nails caked and curlicued in dirt.
Locked in liminal groove,
she seems to be
modeling a departure in frieze,
seems to be subtextually grave
in her long sepulchral silences
and arias disembodied
with no middle ground
of which to speak.
She has seen through me.
Cleanly and clinically harpooning
chunks of interior
like pulpy grapefruit speared
by a serrated spoon–
I am at the mercy of this makeover
and time travel hearse,
taken way way back
to the elegy of small hours
unspoken
and hidden worlds
unheard of.
She, as in garden and allergy,
spreading virulent chills and rash.
It was disaster,
and flirting with disaster,
and skirting disaster all in one.
I was in love.
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.
John Biscello 