Author Archives: John Biscello

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About John Biscello

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, novelist, poet, performer, playwright and filmmaker, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of six novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, No Man’s Brooklyn, The Last Furies, and No One Dreams in Color; 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 plays have been staged and performed both nationally and internationally.

Not Enough

Not Enough came out of me like a homuncular chunk of greasy green cheese, oozing and bubbling pus that hissed and wheezed. Macro-snot meets goblin. I was taken aback. This had come out of me? How? Where? This had been … Continue reading →

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Freight

Red notebooks. Blue. Black. Yellow. Never green. I don’t know why not green, maybe some autistic glitch or allergy. Just never green. Over thirty years’ worth of notebooks, in which sketches and impressions have been dutifully registered, recorded, preserved. Mind-breaths … Continue reading →

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Us

There is something bluntly parenthetical about the ghosts which inhabit memory. And become us, if only in pronouns.

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Turning of the Screw

Memory as defiant neverland where cryogeny is the norm and no one grows up only inward. We bore into ourselves, screws to a tease.

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Maybe Next Time

I write as if someone is chasing me. As if I am being stalked. Or running out of time. Since childhood I have written this way, with a sense of heightened and red-hot urgency. There is someone or something behind … Continue reading →

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Torchlight

She turned longing into a form of religion, effect to the cause of a martyr raised to exact scorch from quenchless tender.

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Hot Coals

Firespeak sing n swing. This is a mode, a chariot and vehicle of expression. Bardic in its yawping and hot rod in its bebop turbine. Whitman revved it. Coltrane. Kerouac. Ginserg. Bird. Riot, blues and jazz rolled into self-sung nuptials. … Continue reading →

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Window Dressing

Out the window worlds come in, flashing in doses and quarters  and nickels and slices and geometrical swaths. Out the window is wealthy in examples and suggestions. When looking out the window, when sailing, we become a pair of eyes … Continue reading →

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Fool’s Play

To take the plunge is, or can be, an act of willful trespass, courting the Fool as you merge with his flagged archetype while plunging down into a ravine, your life tomorrowless in its abyss and calling. The plunge is … Continue reading →

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Post-Scriptive

Something about the air of absence, its titillation and gravity. Ghosts are highly seductive when revealing their apparent lack. Beck sang about gravity shackles going wild. Genius is childhood endowed with virile maturity. Baudelaire said that. Or something to that … Continue reading →

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