Sometimes,
you’ve got to stand at the liminal edge,
equal parts trespass and yield,
your entire life a fragile ceremony
of plunge and arc,
respiring within spells of wonder.
From the absolute hovel
of unlettered ruins,
a crabby shard,
reflecting a tasseled badge of moonlight—
this, the modest origins
to ceremony and marvel,
as she built an outlaw cathedral
of self,
in which she dwelled and worshipped,
vagrantly hospitable
to the glittering harem of angels
who, nightly,
swooped down
to carve sacral
texts of light
upon her rumored longing
to grow sheer,
and host holy fire.
Collection of plays forthcoming from CSF Publishing.
Arson & Grace
Think of this collection as a black-market passport to a realm of lucid dreams and savage jest. Or as the splintered signpost to a crossroads where pop culture, mythology and surrealism intersect. Spanning a thirteen-year-period (2003-2016), Arson & Grace comprises eight plays written by John Biscello. In a world, which is warped sibling to ours, and reflected back to us through funhouse mirrors, you will find love, death, madness and family dysfunction given fresh theatrical makeovers, while meeting a motley assortment of characters straddling the blurred lines between reality and illusion. From penile-enlarged patriarchy to airports where babies are confiscated to werewolves who don’t waltz, the spirit of commedia dell’arte and “zanni,” is alive and well in the Wonderland playscapes of Biscello. Abandon reason all ye who enter here—and trespass lightly.
You held the islands in your eyes,
where it rained
and rained and then the sun warmed wet to a wafting hiss.
This Jean, you, the feline slink,
filigreed shock, and sinewy comb
of whitelaced waves
ruffling upon
puttied blobs of shore.
Heartsore eyes,
you looked out
when no one was looking,
when the judges had lost sight of you,
and then, daring glee, you’d dive
into the smallest kingdom,
of mudpies and sandcastles,
seafizz kissing the wiggling halfmoons of fresh pink toes,
and you’d laugh and laugh, nymph of the sea,
begging its inheritance and claim
with the involuntary desperation of the meek.
Yet the islands, at the mercy of memory-tides,
flooded regularly, and you, rag doll corseted to a raft,
were carried back back back—
the shabby hotel rooms with vicious mirrors,
brightly lit cafes with trained voices
faring your terrors,
and your heart, o your poor heart,
a ruptured cadenza
consummating tender relations
with all the wrong men,
and out of its brokeneness
flowed the sap and resin
of nursery school blues—
I didn’t know
I didn’t know
I didn’t know.
There was the bottle,
gauzy fretted palls,
the milkfingering of wind.
There was also ribbed fringes of prose,
and that was where we found you,
alone, the barest treble,
shipwrecked on a distant island
that was mostly made of mist, and nostalgia, scabbed.
You held the islands in your eyes, Jean, where gashes
came to know the sea’s suture and rhyme, its flicking bluegreen tongues
as balm and frolic upon
the smallest kingdom
restored
to grace.
Out of silence, and lidded smolder,
arose a localized storm.
You could say
it was a balletic squall
forecasting its own tyrant reign
and fall, a fate designed
to galvanize and then blackout
not so gently into that goodnight
exit wreck.
Nature is as nature does,
right, Mr. Pollock?
In your rare case,
mercury dripped
from your stubby filaments
like quicksilver on the lam,
and you, part-man, part-wolf,
part-periodic-chart-of-elements,
spindling rogue science and alchemy
into a singular tempest,
you, Pollock, changed the course
of weather.
You disrupted the static quo
by flashing X-rays of a gutted dreamscape,
by showing us the prehistoric graffiti
on God’s bathroom stall.
Some people blanched, others blushed, some sneered,
still others reviled
the day you picked up a brush
and dared to anoint yourself a painter.
As if
art was their remedial eunuch and pet valet,
housebroken and trained
to cross the parlor
without disturbing their death-rites
or wrinkling the air.
The testicular jilt
and primacy of your form
did not fit their paradigm,
they hadn’t yet designed
the right bag in which to carry your balls.
Of course, what they lacked in vision,
they made up for in money and scissors,
and so it was only a matter of time before
snip and kaching.
Alchemy defies dimestore analysis,
and yet the riots you laid down, Pollock,
the freewheeling dervishes and calisthenics
captured on canvas and arrested in space,
continue to inspire freebase bop solos—
Form following dysfunction
of the world at large
off a cliff
running the ground up
to lightning rods within
igniting crack and boom
and the kaleidoscopic pop
of a cosmic aneurysm
BIGBANG
seeherenow
the manic hodgepodge of conjugal blips
seethereabove
nimbus mating with melted crayons,
and the whorling gist of Van Gogh’s skies
reimagined as atomic ruptures
seedownbelow
waggling freeform tentacles
of a giant mythical squid with a bloodlust
for pirates and ships
seeburningwithin
viscous hysteria, and vitreous strands of dreamstuff
as if bugleblown out of the Universe’s congested pope of a nose.
You danced your beautiful palsied dance
inside the paintings, Mr. Pollock,
you romanced dark clouds and silver linings
with your own glyphic sense of cherish,
and if nature is as nature does,
then I’d say that
soul-expansion and self-annihilation
ran hand in hand
in you
like vagrant playmates or prickly bedfellows,
the molecular rasp
of a perfect storm
beyond which all else
paled.
Religion of rain,
I prayed to get wet, and then
entered her slowly.
“Hurry Slowly”
was the ticktock mantra
of the photographer,
Josef Sudek, who praised
and made lasting secret love
to his Muse and ghost-veiled
bride, Prague,
vowing his fugitive eye
to her
and her alone.
Photo by Josef Sudek
John Biscello 