The slow, long walk home,
across a frozen tundra–
The sun smiles, faintly.
By turns,
the sworn blue tenor
of lyric and charge,
a few simple words
warmed over in holy bask
and offered to the close-knit
belles and folds
of slow-felt darkness,
a writer’s pinkish interior gauze
to hem the silvery saying of grace
in the smallest hours,
to pay heed
and praise
to the raw crafting of light
into humble trembling hymns
and violet vespers
founting.
You don’t need a ship
and exile,
or filial fate
and distance,
to qualify homesickness–
the odyssey is a cellular trip,
always has been,
its bounds limitless,
its lyrical content
specifically tailored
to your individal
course and movements,
and so I say:
May your voyage,
rogue, flagless, and uncharted,
be a blessed one
as you carry your secret name,
and its sired calling,
into the wondergiving wilds
of the heart’s hidden countries
and islands.
Right now
so many of us
functioning as cheerleaders
in an existential maternity ward
showing love and support
for our friends
and loved ones,
for our own tenuous selves,
as we rebirth into new forms,
as we undergo necessary metamorphoses,
and it is important to remember
the nourishing part
that the dark, and silence,
plays in this delicate and complex process,
at once fragile, powerful, mysterious, practical, magical,
and vigorously on the side of life.
Do not strive, allow, and do your best
to honor and respect transformation,
in yourself and others,
as the seed-spitting
miracle gangster
god
of slow alchemy.
Artwork by Mark Rothko
Happy birthday, Henry Miller!
“One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”–H. 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.
The invitation
came out of thin, seeding air–
Your life needs you, now.
It is in that glacial place,
the skinned heart of ice country,
where the miracle rush of stilled water
charges the aspiring craft
and wonder of veins,
it is there
that you will come
to understand the value
of dancing embers
as living symbols
and starters
in a myth starring you
as the silent partner
to life’s genius
for its own flagrant
lore
and pitch.
Garden caked in snow,
single charmed rose, metaphor
to give hope its due.
A father’s pocket,
containing secret petals—
the meaning of love.
If there are better
prayers than laughter,
dancing and touch,
I have not found them,
to know our true legacies
as electric beings
binging
in limitless pools
of dreamjazz,
is to pray the wilds
with glimmering abandon,
to dare our hearts
communion,
and turns
toward the marvelous.
John Biscello 