Will wonders never cease
to freeze in place
Beauty’s corseted voice,
how we kiss rain
between slats of sunlight
and thin air?
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized
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Tagged Beauty, classic, John Biscello, ladies, parasol, poem, Poetry, rain, sunlight, vintage, women
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Manic with vigor,
city’s chaste love affair with
itself,
off the rails.
Pale girl’s greenest grief,
fleeced by soft seedless petals–
Hands blooming to freeze.
Posted in Artwork, Poetry, Uncategorized
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Tagged death, dreams, grief, haiku, hamlet, innocence, John Biscello, love, Ophelia, poem, Poetry, shakespeare, unrequited love
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We, running and running
in place, fearful of cellular retakes,
were arranged to be unmade–
vagrants to symmetry’s tow.
The Catholic school girls.
With their short plaid skirts and white collared shirts and the inviting exposure between where the skirt cut off and the sock began, generating an erotic glare of exposed flesh.
In their uniforms the Catholic school girls felt like a superior breed, they were of higher stock and quality. I think we needed to see them that way, that if they represented cleanness and purity to our degeneracy and vileness, that meant they could serve as powerful forces, magical and otherwordly, beyond or above the shit of our neighborhood, and restore us to the greater parts of ourselves, the higher parts. They could restore us to us.
In this respect they were indispensable.
At the same time, on some level, we hated them for exactly the same reasons.
We needed to tear them down, make them pay for indiscretions they had never committed, trespasses they had never enacted. They could purify us, they could damn us.
On a most fundamental level, we were scared of them, or perhaps scared of how much we needed them.
Posted in Prose, Uncategorized
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Tagged Bishop Kearney, boys, Brooklyn, catholic school, catholic school girls, catholicisim, girls, John Biscello, lust, mother mary, Prose, purity, story, virgin mary
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I dumped all my G.I. Joes out of the shopping bag and onto the pavement of the driveway. I separated the good guys from the bad guys, and then arranged them in specific positions. Before initiating a battle, or an “episode,” as I called them, I would survey the figures, making sure that all weapons were in place, no good guys were mixed with bad guys, no one was missing.
As I inspected my tableaux, a shadow came over my miniature world.
I looked up.
It was Anya.
Her hair was in pigtails and she was eating a bright red icicle. A red stain was ringed around her mouth. Continue reading →
Posted in Prose, Uncategorized
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Tagged action figures, Brooklyn, cartoons, childhood, crush, duke, G.I. Joe, innocence, John Biscello, Literary, love, New York, play, Prose, romance, scarlett, story, war
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Eden as live bait,
we fall hook line and sinker–
Epitaph for love.
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized
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Tagged badlands, bait, bisti badlands, eden, garden, innocence, invocation, John Biscello, love, poem, Poetry, romance
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Bathing in prism,
beloved praise of warm hands–
Grace freely given.
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized
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Tagged blessing, bodhisattva, dwan light sanctuary, grace, haiku, hands, John Biscello, love, poem, Poetry, praise, prism, rainbow
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Lady of the lake
of sorrows and penitence–
How deep is your blue?
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized
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Tagged Beauty, Blue, haiku, John Biscello, lady of the lake, lake, las vegas, moody, New Mexico, penitence, poem, Poetry, sadness, sorrow, storrie lake, twilight
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Halloween.
As was tradition, the boys would stalk the neighborhood, armed with cartons of eggs and cans of Barbasol. Me and my friends were foam-caked, yolk-splatted messes when we ran into Alexis and her friends coming home from school. They were dressed in their Catholic school girl uniforms, not a trace of egg or shaving cream marking their clothing. When the girls saw us and knew they were in danger of being “bombed,” as we called it, they collectively warned—You’d better not—knowing we would. Which we did.
I exclusively targeted Alexis, cracking several eggs on her head and dosing her with clouds of shaving cream. Alexis squealed and screamed the entire time, which excited me. When we were done, the girls cursed us out and yet took it in stride, understanding that we were boys, in Brooklyn, on Halloween, and they had expected no better from us.
I stared at Alexis, made-over by my renegade handiwork, and thought she looked beautiful. A beautiful mess whom I so badly wanted to kiss. We didn’t kiss, but Alexis did hit me hard on the arm and called me an asshole while smiling big. My heart rose. Maybe just maybe we had a future together.
Posted in Prose, Uncategorized
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Tagged Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, catholic school girls, crush, halloween, jack and sally, John Biscello, Prose, story, urban, young love
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