John Biscello

I’m not going to lie.

From a solipsistic perspective

and point of view,

it’s been pretty damned sweet.

Nowhere to be,

no timeclocks clogging and vicegripping

the rhythms, movements and pulse

of each day’s choiceless unfolding,

an unflagging sense

of innate vagrancy

merging harmoniously

with rituals of my own making.

This, in certain respects, is the life I always dreamed of:

nights and days comprising writing, meditation, exercise,

loveplay, walking, reading, eating, movie-watching, and other strains

of goofing around.

It’s like I swallowed a piece of the moon,

and it’s now stuck in my chest like a lightning-bug

beaconing warmly round my heart and making me a tad loony

and happy-crazy.

I feel like Walt Whitman wearing electric underwear.

Juiced, blessed, grateful,

slotted in a state of resignation and passivity.

Is this my most natural way of being in this world?

I have no desire to join any cyber-groups, or to become a part

of the makeshift virtual society that has so quickly sprung up

to give people new platforms, forums, hang-outs, watering holes

of social value.

Is this what Henry Miller meant when he zealously trumpeted—

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

To not have to be anything, or be anywhere, to not coil the length of days

according to a turnstile revolution of arrivals and departures,

to be fully and wholly engaged in reality as an amorphic playscape,

and yourself its protean playmate, to enjoy it, things, as they are.

Sometimes a part of me says I should feel guilty for enjoying my life

in times of duress and crisis, and yet I cannot abide this voice,

or rather it pales in comparison to the sense and feeling that acceptance

of circumstances and finding enjoyment within those circumstances

is churchless devotion to Universal Lore, to that which is cosmic opera

and existential drama, while cultivating space for wonder, zest and freeform

play to enter.

Everyone lives within their own house of mirrors, and has their own relationship dynamic with the reflections which busy and occupy us all.

Beyond the house of mirrors, there’s that marvelous prevailing rumor and promise of nothing,

a void unreflected.

Between the house of mirrors and reaming void, I am choosing to dance like a lunatic,

laugh like a madman, and spraypaint scripts and lyrics into thin air with a rubber hose

made from Gorgon scales and Sesame Street leftovers.

Why the hell not? I am here now. Grateful as a fool at the cliff’s beckoning edge.