John Biscello

Storytelling

Posted on February 24, 2020 by John Biscello

Void is boring,

a dull throb.

It has no stories to tell.

And yet, from the gaping orient

of emptiness

arises every story imaginable,

a turning to peaks

and sea-changes galore.

It seems, Void is the company

we are destined to keep,

an inheritance beyond the salience of claim,

and stories our children and lovers,

the warm ephemeral gains

to hold us, briefly, in tenderest thrall.

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged emptiness and its contents, John Biscello, poem, storytelling, talespin, void and nil | Leave a comment

Between Despair and Hope: A Song

Posted on February 24, 2020 by John Biscello

Unnamed,

deep, dark,

the immaculate root-base

from which the muted call

to home

signals an exile’s longing

to claim merger, absolute.

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged John Biscello, love-self, merger, poem, Poetry, song of despair, song of hope | Leave a comment

Starfishing

Posted on February 23, 2020 by John Biscello

In the hazy evening smolder

(somewhere there is a fire, sirens

sounding alarm)

you dream

of her

as a jellied starfish

suctioned to your face

until breathing becomes a revised

species of flirtation

and you relinquish your lips

to the fete of longing

and kiss the air

tasting of smoke

(where has she gone?)

as the sirens draw nearer

to you,

and you alone,

the fault of ash

bound to the siege

of a dream-life deferred.

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged dreamlife, erotic starfish, John Biscello, kissing, poem, Poetry | Leave a comment

Review of Virtuoso

Posted on February 21, 2020 by John Biscello

“But I see my mind’s asleep.
Were it to remain wide awake from this point on, we should quickly arrive at the truth, which may well be all around us now (its angels weeping)!” — Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

And so, let us start by imagining those angels, weeping. Their tears, tiny silver scalpels. Their wings, mangled. Their faces, featureless and orphaned to pools of light. They are everywhere, traceless repositories for unheard screams and unheld children who grow fitfully into adults (housing mutated unheld children in the attics of their guts, the sacral basements of their anuses). Everywhere, innocents locked in metaphysical orphanages, everywhere, angels slashing at air with turquoise tears.

This is what needs to be imagined, conjured, arrived at. This is how gauzy scrim calls to the curious and brave and dream-blooded to sneak intimate peeks, like the tenderest of spiritual peepshows. Here, I return to Rimbaud, or rather how he was compared to Paul Verlaine in Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Engima, by Jean-Luc Steinmetz: “Where Verlaine describes, Rimbaud hallucinates, and creates an epic. It is not the recreation of a décor that matters to him, but the shaping of one from the starting point of a few elements bestowed by reality. Authentic magic, a spellcasting gesture.” It is this sort of spellcasting and sorcery, this strain of numinous lyricism, which forges strange angels from silhouettes in Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso.

Read the full review at Riot Material.

Virtuoso

Posted in Books, Press, Prose, Publications, Uncategorized | Tagged book review, John Biscello, novel, Prose, riot material, two dollar radio, Yelena Moskovich | Leave a comment

Waiting for the Punchline

Posted on February 21, 2020 by John Biscello

The mind,

locked in Time’s vice-grip,

operating as a splicer

and instrument of quartering

and dissection,

as if there really were

isolated strips

amounting to calendar-flipped years—

1923, 1932, 1974, 1980, 1999—

as if Time were somehow real

and not just the shadows of a convenient disguise

calculated to cover up the numberless

and unbroken continuum of NOW,

and the truth is, we both perish and persist

as manic glimmers within every moment,

same as we cryogenize the specious history

of bones slotted for future sowing.

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged bone-sowing in real-time, here and now, John Biscello, numbers game, of time and not, poem, the promise | Leave a comment

The Gospel According to Heart

Posted on February 14, 2020 by John Biscello

Become your own valentine.

Carve your initials

in the soft yielding bark

of your rooted hidden self,

dwell there, with choice tenderness

swelling the boundaries of your troubadour heart.

Become true to your own basking,

to the wonder-wheeling molecular bond

between you and the Universe.

Pay good, gracious attention,

and know that Love’s undimming proof

cannot be boxed, quartered, dissected, or defaced—

in essence, it is traceless in its vim and smolder.

Become your own valentine,

and come to feelize the truth

that you are not even “you,”

that is a shining sham and beggared illusion.

You are a part and magnetic extension

of the everythingness that shapes and forms

what might you call the universal lore of attraction.

And, if you so desire, you can fight it off

with a hundred clubs or thousand sticks

in a million different ways,

but that will not change the fact

that you are wedded to an energetic orgy of togetherness,

a liminal bubblebath that includes everyone and everything.

It is What IS. Dig?

The Universe, as a Valentine’s torch song

of cosmic proportions,

throbs and hums and thrums and palpitates,

which gives you a chance to tune in, Now,

to a self-Love Supreme,

and become your own gospel

to what dreams may come.

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(Artwork by Izumi Yokoyama)

Posted in Artwork, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged Artwork, dreamlife, izumi yokoyama, John Biscello, love is real, love supreme, starring:heart, universal lore, valentine | Leave a comment

Self-Love Supreme