I close my notebook,
and everything that goes with it,
and listen to the crow
cawing outside my window.
I get confused.
Is he saying
Winter is coming soon,
or,
It’s time to dream rightly,
as I do,
with zero regard for time zones
or distance.
I wait for the crow to say more.
Nothing. Silence.
I open my notebook
and jot down
my happy misunderstandings
between lines
without measure.
In the small hours,
and secret world,
where nocturnal flowers
call for tenderest glances
and esteem,
blooming
occurs at the inevitable pace
of dreams,
and swooning resolve.
Victory
is the epilogue to squabble.
And its prelude too.
That is, when your bayonet
plunges into the ribcage
or spleen of another
version of you,
the moon weeps
slow silver rivers
of tears,
unconsoled by the glitteringly
indifferent stars,
same as the wanton humans
who have gravely lost touch
with the moon’s most sensitive
feedback.
Here, then,
is the poet’s most holy
and vocational duty–
to clarify, beyond the rabble
and ill communication,
something flowingly equivalent
to the reflection of the moon
on dark rippling waters,
sated, briefly,
in savvy communion
with what lies beneath.
“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”–Voltaire
Philosophy,
like the proverbial weasel,
goes POP,
as God, sporting a Groucho Marx get-up
(you know, the glasses, the eyebrows, the cigar)
delivers gags and zingers,
turning the entire world
into a vaudeville circuit
as the audience files out
the in door.
At the break of day,
wandering softly within–
you, from a distance.
“We are strangers and exiles here. I feel it now more certainly than ever—and the only home a man ever has on earth, the only moment when he escapes from the prisms of loneliness, is when he enters into the heart of another person. In all the enormous darkness of living and dying, I see these brave little lights go up—the only hope and reason for it all … I believe in love, and in its power to redeem and save our lives.”—Thomas Wolfe
Redemption,
through every course,
is a loving wake
to ports unrivaled.
“Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.”—Anais Nin
Leave the impossible
to the fishes
and the stars,
to packed suitcases
tagged for Borneo or Mars.
Or, become like Alice,
and commit six random acts
of impossibility
before you’ve had your breakfast,
which still leaves plenty of time
to do regular things like shopping
or the dishes,
though you can bet
that your noon lunch date
with The Fool
at the edge of that seaside cliff
will be looming large
and may endanger
your routine of normalcy
for the rest of the day
or for years to come.
“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
How many,
committed to their record of days
upon the earth,
crusade with a pen
and floating paper lanterns
pooling soft warm light
into the history of hidden valentines
pressed between the vellum pages
of a life
lived after the facts,
and before fiction’s altar,
a course on hunger
and its commensurate desires.
In that place
of memory and moonlight
where dreams pool
into soft beautiful wrecks,
I found her,
casually adrift
in a limbo of her own legislation,
and at the slightest touch,
under she went,
the moonlight left trembling
in remembrance
of her skin.
John Biscello 