John Biscello

We need visionaries, now, more than ever.

Those in tenderest thrall

to the lore of zeal and trespass,

this side of dreaming.

We barker for the rise and call

of the New Romantics who,

in their shedding of scales and sundering of veils,

are preparing to open up to the ceremony of new skin.

We need beginners

to enter into the folds of Mystery,

which, unlike plot, thins

into the respiring air of wonder,

and flagless expansion.

We need those who are inspired

to vision sideways,

to model the unilateral tango of crabs

who move upon this earth with fluent mobility;

We are combing near and distant shores

for those willing to humbly

assume the mantle of guests,

while abdicating, like outworn appendages,

the petrified rod and spite of mastery.

Rest assured, watchtowers will collapse,

birthday cakes of ash and symmetry

will be spawned from the crisped rainbow plumage

of Phoenixes duly resurrected;

Dusk, in its celluloid gauze,

will coerce us into becoming surfers of gloam,

initiates of the in-between and unknown.

We need visionaries, now, more than ever.

Those willing to approach the doorstep of the Muse

as orphans with manna-starved eyes, where we are treated

to a marvelous bounty of gifts, previously undreamed, untried.

We need diggers willing to trade in rusty spades

for dancing threads, blood-dark roads

for ones that are impossibly red,

sterile spats of data

for innate feelizations.

Intuition,

you see,

is that old reliable bucket

bound to the rope

lowered into the well

from which ancient-new

seeds, moist and dark,

are drawn up into the light.

We need humanly wrapped beacons,

pooling to source

and harmonize

the cellular strife

of warring selves within;

We need to unlearn,

just enough,

to embrace

a new season of vocabulary,

and no longer be afraid of

or so quick to ridicule, belittle or dismiss

words such as

soul, mystic, witch, alchemy, wonder and why-not.

It was long ago prophesized

by one of those new-old Romantics,

Mister Arthur Rimbaud—

“At dawn,

armed with burning patience,

we shall enter the splendid cities.”

Visions,

which milk sunrise

from that timeless place,

do not age or wrinkle

or grow outdated,

they are, and remain,

the sound glimmering basis

for a renewable scape of dreaming,

feral seeds popping and sputtering

like homesick newborns

in the heart’s greenest drifts

and wilds.

There has been a bugled call

to bless your broken softly,

to become as aria and chorus,

brimming seismic yawps

in Whitman’s electric circus,

and at the liminal edges,

where torn veils

flutter like green wind,

and soul-speak meets felt-sense,

that is where you can hear

the whispers and echoes,

repeating in a continuum—

We need visionaries, now, more than ever,

those willing to marvel dumbly,

hopelessly in love

with Wonder’s wheeling gist.