Remains of the Day

The first spots were discovered, and contrary to my sense of fiction, they had nothing to do with extraterrestrials or loneliness. Nor poverty. Soon, no exact timetable, but soon my memories would no longer be mine. I would no longer have a fixed place within their shifting geography and tablature, within their persuasive mythology. I would become a vagrant mimic, shadowing my elusive host. I would drift, and keep on drifting—a severed and bi-polar chunk of glacier. My memories would be scattered like pixelated minnows in a raging sea. I talk like this, in the color of metaphors and melting wax, while I still can … before language abandons me, or I it. I have decided to keep a record. Uneven, sprawling, subject to inclement moods and their accompanying tides … it doesn’t matter .. some kind of record, some kind of something—In Memory of Memory—that’s what I’d call it, if I were to call it anything. Which I won’t.

Let me start again: my memory is going and where it is going I cannot follow.

Let me start again-again: There are ghosts everywhere. And this brings me more comfort than you can possibly imagine.

P.S. I have always imagined myself intimate with distances, with myself at a distance. The spots, in their flagless colonization, will change all that. What will remain? And who will speak on behalf of those remains?  

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About John Biscello

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, writer, poet, performer, and playwright, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of four novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, and No Man’s Brooklyn; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. He also adapted classic fables, which were paired with the vintage illustrations of artist, Paul Bransom, for the collection: Once Upon a Time, Classic Fables Reimagined. His produced, full-length plays include: LOBSTERS ON ICE, ADAGIO FOR STRAYS, THE BEST MEDICINE, ZEITGEIST, U.S.A., and WEREWOLVES DON’T WALTZ.
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