It would be the last time,
the last thinning whatever
that gave night its fool’s edge
and lyrical tilt—
Scraping half-moon fingernails
against famished odds,
he briefly paused to consider
the bottomless gorge
of a hungry ghost
demanding of its host-body
a moveable feast.
Traversing,
in a beat shuffle
and worn cadence,
many oblique side streets
and shadow-stained back alleys
to arrive at where he now stood—
the white-hot lure
and rigged bait
of a suspect angel,
who played hard to get,
beckoned with an ineffable wink.
Visionary, cinematic shaman, and iconconclastic creative force, David Lynch was one of the most profound influences and inspirations in my life, someone whose work impacted me deep in my core and could move me to tears. Truly and thoroughly one of a kind. His spirit now travels through the Black/White Lodge and beyond. Journey well, maestro.
In 2018, I wrote a review/essay about David Lynch and his memoir, Room to Dream. To put words to the page, honoring this man’s work as an artist and cinematic phenomena, made me very happy. Here is the opening paragraph from that piece:
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
— Edgar Allan Poe
For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making.
One of my recent projects has been compiling stories and flash fiction into a collection titled: Lives in the Day Of. After selection, rewriting, and editing, the collection comprises twenty-two pieces, spanning the past fifteen years. Some of these works have appeared in different magazines, journals and anthologies (and some are scheduled for publication in 2025). I also plan to release audio and video recordings of select pieces this year.
We didn’t talk about it, but we knew we’d never amount to anything, no matter what we did. No matter how celebrated the accomplishment, no matter how big the fiction and the audience buying it, nothing could ever fill those holes deep down inside us, though we’d never relent, whistling past boneyards and shooting the breeze full of furious patter. We were, as my friend Joey once called us—The Dirtbags of the Universe. I’m not sure what prompted him to say it, probably just one of those acidic outbursts that we, kids from Brooklyn, specialized in—and after he said it, I looked at him, said nothing, maybe smiled, but the term immediately burrowed into one of those deep down holes and became an echo, gathering dark, before splintering and sharpening into an insight. Joey was right. We were the Dirtbags of the Universe. We felt ourselves to be so, which amounted to something far more powerful than truth—collectively, we possessed the character of a single raindrop, skidding toward an open sewer, just because.
John Biscello 