John Biscello

Breathing in,

this holy seethe,

an etheric reflux

of fierce fire and starlight,

which has kept me in tow

and fasting thrall

to my dreams

for as long as I can remember.

When I was a budding young sorcerer,

new to the world, I knew all the right spells by heart,

and understood, not through intellect or common logic,

but through a felt-sense, the natural course

of my relationship to the elements,

and to the mutable feast

comprising my worlds within.

I twinned, and then I split,

watching a consortium of fragments

move out into time and space,

satellites orbiting the Grand Guignol of life,

each with a different set of needs

and demands,

yet sorcery remained,

at the hidden luminous heart of it all,

my deadpan and mentor,

my best friend and cosmological lynchpin.

Sorcery, even when I wasn’t looking,

or perhaps especially when I wasn’t looking,

taught me how to boogie to private drumming sessions,

and deeply trust and abide in lyrics untranslated to mortal claims

and everyday thought;

Sorcery, behind my back, showed me a path into and through

fated woods where tall dark trees

moonlighted as metaphors

while simultaneously maintaining their realness,

and I was lulled into marveling at the memory of silver,

as it fell from leaves like filigreed fingers of rain.

Sorcery asked me

to look beyond my need for control,

to cede the smallest view in a windowless room

for the edges of cliffs that petitioned my plunging,

parachuteless, into an immeasurable unknown.

Sorcery asked me to gamble on the infinite.

Fear often held me in check,

or stuck voodoo pins

into the doll-sized effigy imagined by me,

but sorcery would swoop in like gangbusters

to break up energetic knots and kinks.

It might have been easier

if sorcery would have assumed the form

of a snow-bearded wizard with the requisite daftness,

intrigue and ancient-infancy, but that wasn’t the case—

It was form-less, a feeling, a gauzy ball

of glowing green light pitted in a gut-rooted squall,

it was a calling, to not see but intuit

the mirrormask Buddhasmile

painted across the moon’s featureless face,

it was faith of epic yet subtly fine-tuned proportions.

When sorcery talks to me, or rather when I am given a chance

to translate its ciphers and glyphs, it says things like—

Mapless wayfaring is not for the faint of heart,

or, Wonder is your spiritgiven privilege, do not squander it!

It is then that I do my best to relax and surrender,

to give myself wholly over to something much bigger than mortal-visioned-me,

and the power comes in recalling the naively wise felt-sense

of that budding young sorcerer who knew all the right spells by heart,

and who, to this day, remains in thrall to the holy seethe,

equal parts fierce fire and starlight.