Present Musings

Houses of a Crystal Muse, featuring the poetry of John Biscello and Antoinette Nora Claypoole, and images by Issa De Nicola and Anthony Distefano, is now available in two editions: black and white and full color, with alternate covers. Purchase here.
For those interested in reviewing the book, free digital versions are available upon request.
“Growing Legend”
Metamorphosis makes demands on us all, and imposes its necessary will, but love, rooted in omnipresence, is not subject to change.
It is a legend, limitless in freight and scope, and famous for its radiant center.

crystal muse II

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Still Life W/Selfie

(From Houses of a Crystal Muse, Wild Embers Press, December 2019)
houses
How I,
my ego-fiend-self,
craves
and wishes
and desires
to take ultimate credit
for the words
and poems
attaching themselves
to their mortal host, John Biscello,
thinly grafted to his signature and persona,
but deep down
I understand all too well
that there are forces at work
and play,
which are beyond me/my name,
of which I am a frayed stitch
in a gracious skein,
and my heart, the fool’s testing guide
and tramp
to a fathomless row
and drift,
puckers its secret lips
to kiss the rippling hem
of whatever muse, whatever form/less
bastion of grace
tenders fluency to offerings,
i.e.,
how a puddle
is sometimes lucky
enough to intimate
the largesse of the sea,
to hoist pearls
just above the murk
and fallacious din.

dissolution

Image by Anthony Distefano
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The Fool

Review of Anne Serre’s The Fool (and Other Moral Tales).
Among the linty cling of rumors and backwashed gossip spread around the barrooms and laundromats of the universe, circulates this mortuary nugget: Hey, did you know that Ego, when it dies, would love nothing more than to attend its own funeral? Ego, in brazenly counterpointing Woody Allen’s proclamation — “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens” — would happily play the role of phantom witness while enjoying the privileged position of being able to float above its own death. It could view itself through the ceremony of mirrored eyes, and gauge its impact upon the audience gathered in its name. Ego, or the I-self, aspires to dream itself into a permanent narrative, to secure tenancy in a time-loop — it longs to know its movements are in accord with something lasting. This fretful existential dilemma, as it relates to writing, to functioning as a writer, and to the amorphic realm of stories and narrative, finds itself swaddled in the gallows’ silk of Love and Death, in Anne Serre’s new book, The Fool (and Other Moral Tales).
The Fool (and Other Moral Tales) by Anne Serre. Reviewed at Riot Material magazine.Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson, Serre’s book comprises three novellas, each one a fragile and cryptic shard reflecting the shattered stained-glass window from which they exploded. “The Fool,” the tale with which the collection shares its name, speaks to the narrator’s uneasy relationship with the arcana of the Tarot, specifically THE FOOL. As someone who is fond of, or rather depends upon order and the rigors of symmetry, the narrator distrusts what THE FOOL stands for, or doesn’t stand for. A numberless orphan, THE FOOL’S acts belong to lightning-strikes and cliff-dives, with his mysticism rooted in the magnetic unknown. He is the Orphic vagabond primed to take a chance on the infinite, to teethe and gnaw on the moon’s pulpy nipples. He is also, in a sense, the ambassador to Keats’s anthem of negative capability — “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” — and therein lies the tension and dilemma for Serre’s narrator, as she slowly, haltingly, bravely learns to dance in a house of mirrors with THE FOOL. Reflected everywhere, he is “protean, forever changing shape and appearance, and has a variety of functions … If terror, love, friendship, death and madness, referred to the same figure each time, we would know about that … and they would be less of a burden to us. What’s marvelous is to be able to approach this protean, unsettling body, these sudden transformations of countenance and purpose, without getting so badly burned that you lose your powers of speech.” Silence, imposed from without, is a death-knell that the narrator wishes to avoid through the hallowed amulets of story and poetry.
Read the full review at Riot Material.
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Waking Life

crystal muse II
“Childhood’s Wake” (from Houses of A Crystal Muse, being released this week)
You can feel it
in the air,
a razory sheen,
all the childhoods
that were lost
or stolen
or seized
or buried to model catacombs
and secret lairs,
are returning to the surface
bigtime,
the reclaimants
growing new teeth
and skin
and nails,
new lungs
ballooning to breathe
in ferocious gulps
the holy body of air
charged on loan,
no longer just sipping
from a solitary puddle
through a pinched straw,
but open mouth pressed
like a passionate suction
against the blue-green lips
of the sea,
as if the lost
mad art
of deep-sea-kissing
could inflame
and ignite
a whole new breed of species,
as if every dream
formerly deferred,
or taken out back
and whacked brutally with a switch
until silence became stitches
sewn across lips,
no longer this,
but rather
Childhood’s quivering
and quaking vim
to know itself
as a source of real
and force of soul,
none of it scripted, but felt,
it’s coming back to melt
the dead weight of
fattened albatrosses,
to shake up the core
and very foundations
of what has been established
and set in faulty cement,
and this overdue zoobreak
of wild beauty and feral shoots
will require tending, nurturance,
and breaks from overstaid patterns
fitted to worn-out takes and conditions,
Childhood, as the frenzied sibling to mystic freight,
as the single blade of grass, bearing the greenest of blood-red
beginnings, will make its demands known, will birth necessity
through the gist of lore, and the calling of old wounds
to sutures formerly unknown,
and in this living wake,
Beauty and Grief,
as outsourced twins,
will surely follow,
and we, the claimants,
teetering on the edge of Childhood’s
flagrant beckon,
will re-set fractures
and find release
in going over the edge
to uncharted frontiers
and worlds beyond
our wildest imaginings.
(Cover image by Issa de Nicola)
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Embers Flaring

Houses of a Crystal Muse, a poetic dialogue/collaboration between myself and Antoinette Nora Claypoole, will be released by Wild Embers Press next week. Also featuring images by Issa de Nicola and Anthony Distefano.  Wild Embers is offering free review copies.
Here is one of the poems from the book:
You,
true to your own scythe,
perpetrate with fierce love,
small necessary deaths,
you,
whispering sweet winged words
of encouragement to your reaper,
Hurry now, slowly,
and bless my broken softly,
bless every last ghost
through the numinous host
of reckon,
and watch me
rise,
this side of dream,
bountied
to the swell
of commonest prayers.
–J.B.

houses

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Author in New York

The complete collection of City Beat: Author in New York, a street photography series shot by Anthony Distefano can be viewed here.
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To see more of Anthony’s work, visit his Instagram page.
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City Beat

“For the perfect flaneur, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow. To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home, to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world.” — Charles Baudelaire
The Street Scene, or Urban Wayfarer series, as photographed by Anthony Distefano.

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Brooklyn for Reel

Video recording of a reading from my novel, No Man’s Brooklyn, as part of “Italian Good Fellas Night” at SOMOS (Taos, NM).
In this scene, father and son pay a visit to Atlantic City, where gambling, drinking and storytelling play out under the flickering lights of a knotted past.

 

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(Image by Anthony Distefano)
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Jean Rhys

You held the islands in your eyes, where it rained
and rained and then the sun warmed wet to a wafting hiss.
This Jean, you, the feline slink,
filigreed shock,and sinewy comb
of whitelaced waves
ruffling upon
puttied blobs of shore.
Heartsore eyes,
you looked out
when no one was looking,
when the judges had lost sight of you,
and then, daring glee, you’d dive
into the smallest kingdom,
of mudpies and sancastles,
seafizz kissing the wiggling halfmoons of fresh pink toes,
and you’d laugh and laugh, nymph of the sea,
begging its inheritance and claim
with the involuntary desperation of the meek.
Yet the islands, at the mercy of memory-tides,
flooded regularly, and you, rag doll corseted to a raft,
were carried back back back—
the shabby hotel rooms with vicious mirrors,
brightly lit cafes with trained voices
faring your terrors,
and your heart, o your poor heart,
a ruptured cadenza
consummating tender relations
with all the wrong men,
and out of its brokeneness
flowed the sap and resin
or nursery school blues—
I didn’t know
I didn’t know
I didn’t know.
There was the bottle, gauzy fretted palls,
the milkfingering of wind.
There was also ribbed fringes of prose,
and that was where we found you,
alone, the barest treble,
shipwrecked on a distant island
that was mostly made of mist, and nostalgia, scabbed.
You held the islands in your eyes, Jean, where gashes
came to know the sea’s suture and rhyme, its flicking bluegreen tongues
as balm and frolic upon
the smallest kingdom
restored
to grace.

 

jean rhys

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Henry Miller

Some men rattle their chains and wonder, some sing them.
Then there are others who spraypaint their chains rainbow siege
and dance a jig like a peacock on fire, and when someone asks
Isn’t it hard to dance around with those chains weighing you down,
the man laughs heartily and responds—What chains, my dear lad,
these are feathers. Listen to the way they jangle and clink when I dance,
have you ever heard feathers that sound like that? Miraculous and unusual, yes?
You, Henry Miller, were one of those men.
You turned wrought-iron links, Brooklyn-made, into loafer’s foam,
into dreamfaring plumage, unabashed in its frisson and vainglory,
smeared bottom’s up in in deep semen envy, angel’s spit, and stolen honey.
Vagabondage was your claim, but not your master.
Though you did have many teachers—bilious clowns, crowded streets,
torn trousers, children’s capered faces, gateless barbarians,
your mother’s frigid ruler (and how you learned the only thing
worth measuring was love, that which belonged to the immeasurable).
A lusty little scamp at heart, eyes unpopping buttons
and sailing seas of skirts in parks, you were literature’s answer to Charlie Chaplin,
with an unzipped mouth and cracked tower of seismic songs to yawp,
the world needed a Henry Miller, because you said so,
and in cement that remained eternally wet, you signed your name
and sang, Whitmanesque, of yourself, again and again and again,
an explodingly insistent echo,
and the sincerest of forgeries,
because, for those dwelling between lines,
a signature verifying an identity—
I am he, he is me, he is he, I am I, etc,
never does true justice
to the multitudinous at work
in the playing of one’s self as instrument
upon which God’s deepwelling nothingness
meets and mates with one’s youthingness,
and from there, bang.
Just bang and wow and let’s make radical inscrutable love,
music, art, whatever.
You, “Henry Miller,” wink-wink,
gave us your pulsing timepiece of whatever,
and you, Henry Miller, as my Brooklyn soul-chum and compatriot,
separated by age but not spirit,
granted me amnesty
and helped me to unlock my own
bang, wow, and whatever
resounding yes
whatever
yes
yes.

 

henry III

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