John Biscello

The hatless pilgrim, roving this way and that, a man embodying the virtues of scat (in every sense of the word), roving through starched cardstock fields in search of an impossible flower and its stingy nettles—proud, pistil-engraved, the flower’s gullet braised by rivets of sungold—(this, how the man warms himself within, how he sounds out his vision, vowel by vowel, word by word, merciless in his measure)—this man, evolving and degenerating all at once, has given himself many names—Murphy, Molloy, Malone, Mercier, Camier, Watt, Krapp—nomenclatures in a fishless glass bowl hosting myth and metaphor (some may say madness), the hatless pilgrim ambulating forlornly around placeless terrain, picking up a bruised metaphor here, putting down a scratched symbol or curlicue there, basically, a scavenger versed in vaudeville metaphysics, a ragpicker of the abstract, and master of zero sum instigating a fool’s mission through slates of Braille and algebraic ruins.

We pause. End of Act I.

Act II: We open with the man needing to redress his scarred self in the clothes of a new name. I ask him what it will be. It’s already been Watt, he snides acidly. Mum’s the word. Mum’s the claw and birthing metaphor too. It seems Mum covers a lot. We rejoin the mummified pilgrim already in progress, as he enters a tavern, sits his wind-wearied haunches down on a rickety stool, orders a pint of Guiness, allows his hawk-eyes to do their ravening: men everywhere, soiled, tired, flatulent, fatherless (or fatherstruck, or fatherhunted), Mum’s the word as these men gather to groan and toll haunted bells and tell sorted tales akin to coals raked over dying fires. He absorbs them as mollusks would seawater. Glug glug glug. Guiness done. He asks for music. Not aloud, in his head, Music please, and he hears the faint trembling strains of a Viennese waltz, and he is with her again, twenty-toed and entwined, they whirl somatically while making static love to each other with slug-set eyes. Achhhh, disgust, he spits on his shoes, and is immediately expelled from the music-memory. Back at the tavern, he orders another pint, glup glup glup, done. The men remain a time-doped and disordered quadrant of jittery constellations. Where the hell are the meteors, he slams his hand down upon the counter of his mind. Ouch, he winces, orders another pint, glug glug glug, and the night goes on like this, undivided, matching whittled silence to countless confessional days on end.