John Biscello

(Intraverse, Epitaph for a Beginning is a 24-part poem, which will be included in my collection Arclight. I wanted to present it here, uncut, for those who enjoy swallowing their jagged metaphysical fragments whole.)

1.

Bidden by tatters, and gravity’s mutable arc, the palpitations guide me.

They are subtle, duly engaged, a milk-slow run of shivers.

Bracing the rim, I peer out of cavedark: everything is sudden,

color-soaked, a ferocious din and melt,

fringed shawls of plasma groped by wind.

My eyes struggle to adjust.

At first they all seem like vagrant stabs of light, undifferentiated,

and then comes the exact piercing, prayer of motherlight warming my lungs,

as if I’ve swallowed a blush.

I realize, with grave tenderness, that I am being born of this split,

the heir and progeny of absence.

Hers, his: a recursive lineage of fractures.

Ready or not, my history is formed, my destiny fixed—

I am a furious comeback waiting to happen.

2.

She swallows stones,

or is made to—what feels

like a martyred plunge of boulders.

I am, by proxy, crushed.

Is this what is meant by god-dam?

The circulatory flush of light

to dark dammed, and no god gets

in or out, what amounts to a gag order

or mouthless idol

claiming little to no

real value?

3.

One of the Echoes stated

that being born is like

drawing silence from blood.

True? False? I cannot tell.

The Echoes resound everywhere,

choral flocks spanning the spectrum

from roar to hush; they are

the vocabulary I have inherited,

as if by default.

4.

It’s hard to gauge with finite

accuracy, but I am aware—

she is growing and I am not.

It is, I suspect,

in my nature

to remain small and wanting,

a grievous flutter or

remote hint

cusping revelation.

5.

I get so sleepy

and restless

and roiled

and charged.

If only they knew

what they called world

was simply a clusterfuck

of particles

dreaming of dance partners.

6.

It is both pleasure, and an epitaph to pleasure,

at the same time.

When the phenomena occurs

and the colors run

and slash

and slit down upon me

in ravels of deluge.

Spring-green, shell-pink, sky-blue,

bled-red, egg-heaven, grief-yellow.

I, a perpetual guest

bearing witness

to my own seeds

and desires,

feel at home,

happy prey to a luminous gust,

when the colors cake

and blast through me.

It is then that I no longer fear dry clefted

hollows, or loud leveling booms.

It is lighted proof

that I am not forgotten.

7.

There are no mirrors here,

yet everywhere I see myself,

a bated draft of furls,

each bearing the right

to exist, and respire ably.

8.

I have found

that the impeccable masks

she carves and wears out

with devotional vigor

place me at risk.

By varying turns

and degrees, Intimacy, braised,

grows more distant and endangered

and I with it.

How to stay her hand, or reverse charged currents?

I have tried consulting with the Echoes,

but that was like spitting into bundles of rain,

each droplet anonymous in its gospel

and creed.

9.

They count the age

with linear tact,

enabling stricture.

I do not get this.

The digits do not run

static in a fixed course,

they are not soldiers lined up single-file

marching toward common oblivion.

Age bears shoots and novelty, functions in multiples.

You are not six only once,

nor are you exclusively 33

when you come to exist in your thirty-third year.

Age, in its cumulative front,

is amorphous and inherently radical,

its autonomy breaches named conditions

and numbered plots.

Six happens at six,

and at nine, and at seventeen,

and thirty-three, and so on,

its claim contingent upon variables.

And I, sclerotic

in the cradle of a false womb,

cannot be held or christened by age;

there is no past or future,

no number or given name,

for the fates annulled

at childhood’s edge.

10.

Blue sparks, candles, dancing eyes, bright bulbs of gabble and noise, flung garlands of prayer—

today she is seventeen.

Lipsticked, flaps of scent, strong legs, rogue piercings, pageboy cut, black pumps, gallery of masks and knives—

today she enters seventeen, acid and armed to the teeth,

and I, binding coil,

wait in the wings.

11.

In becoming a ghost

to my own medium,

I am drifting toward clemency,

toward the solvency of locks.

The Echoes, of course, refute this,

and in stereo.

They assure me

that no matter how far the drift,

no matter how deep the cleave,

playing ghost

to my own dream of living

is just another slant of haunt

masquerading as exorcism.

A conundrum, with no respite,

I am baffled by the source of the Echoes, and wonder—

Is there more to me than her?

Where exactly do I begin, and end?

Would I cast a shadow upon a wall in a world without?

I continue to drift, unanswered.

12.

I have begun to name and catalogue the different types of dark.

It helps.

Warm-dark, cave-dark, void-dark, womb-dark, sleep-dark,

Eros-dark, blank-dark, siege-dark,

and there is the anonymous dark that gets in your head

and behind your eyes and in your lungs and constricts your breathing;

curse-dark, which casts a heavy prolonged spell, a pall;

there is also lonely. Naming it doesn’t help, not in the same way.

13.

Gnashing, teething, bristling, ranting, raving—

all, in this momentary wreck, becomes black with tumult.

It is the dark I forgot to name.

14.

Wafting from afar,

the intimate rumor of a divine toy,

a cryptic plaything, implications in tow.

A tonic

and pacifier of blank rages;

buoy and anti-freeze

to sudden plunges

into sub-zero climate.

These conditions cannot be bested,

but they can be met.

If, and here’s where pressure takes root,

if we were in possession of this divine toy,

this cryptic plaything, which may only be

the waning flicker of legend, of evidence withheld.

15.

Seized, I am in the ripe

feral grip of the new language

she is speaking. Her voice

fronting a glassy, ciphered edge, a grifting menace.

Every calculated utterance bears double and triple meaning,

with common intent to baffle,

disarm, intrigue, estrange; a misleading

skein of confession.

In a sense, her unwitting compulsion

to protect me is the root-cause of her

language, its architecture and vents.

If only she could

abide the silence

long enough to exact

the necessary vigil;

if only she didn’t consign

my pink to arson.

16.

To become more or less

human, and right now I am less,

much less, palsied, unlit, a compulsory golem

riveting shallows and depths.

17.

It came to me, a pensive glean, a vision.

Tomorrowtime when we, the Inners, will no longer just be metaphysical whispers

 or codified concepts.

Tomorrowtime when the Outers will have found the means to extrapolate us,

to call us into the world of appetite and elemental yen

(e.g., how light and air cherish in unison).

We will gather as gnostic rumors confirmed as true.

Our caretakers will be directly confronted by the gestalt of our lives,

by our stasis and afflictions.

Brood to their former distances, they will grow nearer to us;

they will live as bright apologies to our scars;

they will sorrow for a long long spell, every last fracture recalling its grief;

and we, barrowing the course of right rain, will come to master

how light and air cherish in unison.

18.

So much light

poured in,

so much

passive worth.

19.

Today, today, today, today, today, today,

this drumbeat I sometimes try and divide into equal sections

and measures.

Yet it is like swimming across an encyclopedia

of sea to vet and speciously catalog

rounds of waves—this one this, this one that;

continuity of a jaded gag.

20.

Blindly, blindly, blindly,

she reaps every choice

from my scythe and asking.

I live with brute innocence

and murder in her heart.

I am not her child,

I am her fiction,

her sad fable

and paling wrath.

21.

I. Honeymoon, forever, ballad, veil, bond, forever again—I am

caving beneath terms that she is repeatedly packing into the hollows.

It is a new kind of spell, whorling and vestal.

II. Perhaps it is the wrong kind of spell,

not to be trusted.

III. The words, as aural emblems, became real.

She, in bright ceremony, matched her absences,

with fidelity and crux, to someone else’s.

IV. Honeymoon, forever, ballad, veil, bond, forever again;

my language has become canticle

to a lighted theme.

V. She is flush and expectant with dream,

and together we tumble toward

an impossible arc.

Story-dark. I have named a new one.

VI. The hollows flood

and brim with a wheeling geometry

of vibrant colors

in which I bathe.

VII. When gesture and symmetry

become one and the same,

Intimacy is moved

to daring.

VIII. I listen to them talk,

like tolling vespers,

like a warm robe of sound

in which I nestle

and chasten.

IX. The days lean against each other,

a staggered verisimilitude.

The ennobling of Legacy

has fast become

a dependency of tatters

and shrieks.

X. Honeymoon, forever, ballad, veil, bond, forever again—

Map to her old scars,

I pitch these words,

void of testament,

into a smoldering hollow;

what the flames don’t devour,

the Echoes will scavenge.

22.

The cited erring

of will and bones,

she has taken leave

of Memory to become

a spectacle of caution.

Rote, exacting, severe,

everything in its place, just so,

to enable function,

and I, the feathery cringe

at the bottom of her fear,

am held, with contempt,

to the highest standard.

23.

In a vain attempt,

she corseted herself in green wind

and cellophane, votive

to a thin whip of air.

As she lay there,

colors emptying to gray,

before the round voices

and fast hands came,

she fell in

and saw me for the first time,

not as fiction or sad fable,

but as a soiled fact

that had been abandoned to peril.

Every last knife and mask slowed to weeping,

venting a silvery glean.

24.

There is an epitaph marking

the life we have lived

from the ones we have not.

This is where I begin

to separate the words

from their cause,

running on, unfinished,

end to start.