Epilogue

Posted on December 3, 2025 by John Biscello

We are ghosts haunting our own lives, understanding on the deepest level that there is no beginning and no end. Because we know that, or in spite of knowing that, we wander, we stalk, we pursue. We give names and values to the things we tell ourselves we are stalking and pursuing, but the truth of the matter is—that name, that value, that designated whatever—is not the true catalyst behind our stalking and pursuance. It is the illusion serving as functional catalyst behind the stalking and pursuance. The stalking and pursuance would be happening, sans named motivation. We stalk, we pursue, we wander, because we are ghosts haunting our own lives. Epitaphs become us in real-time.

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(sic)

Posted on December 3, 2025 by John Biscello

   She compiled what they called obscure texts into what was then labeled an obscure book. She was vilified. To be obscure, to be knowingly obscure, was, as they saw it, was a veiled threat to innocence and an assault on harmony. In other words, without using the word, they called her a witch. Their words, not words at all, but rather banal and unimaginative feats of actionable pitchforks.

   She wasn’t of them. She was other. To be other, and to be obscure on top of being other was egregious and unpardonable. There was no place for her at the table where places had been formally designated. She ate eyeball soup in a glutinous broth using a salad fork. In other words, without using the word disgust … they were disgusted by her.

   Pitchforks flashed in their eyes. All witches come to the same end. Obscurity is always destined for mud, failure, burial. These words they understood and they inhabited warmly—mud, failure, burial. These words were denominators in a common mortuary.

   One evening the woman and her husband were invited to dinner and were greeted at the table by objectionable eyes. One set of eyes became a voice, asking—What is the meaning behind all this obscurity? Breath left the room, like outgoing tide. Roared back in. The woman’s dark eyes glistened. Her expression betrayed no known feeling. Then she lifted her butter knife, and with the palm of her other hand flat against the table, she spread the fingers of that hand as wide as she could, and what followed was frantic needlepoint, the edge of her butter knife flashing blunt silver in the spaces between her fingers, the knife-game, as some have called it. She did this with methodical rapidity, an unbroken cadence to her action. After about a minute, she stopped, set the butter knife down by her plate, and asked in a low, conspiratorial voice—What is the meaning of that?

   The eyes looked at her, astonished, but negatively so. She was, as these types were prone to do, responding to charges of obscurity with more obscurity. One of the men at the table raised his butter knife … set is back down. The woman’s husband said it was best that they get going. They went. Once the door was closed, the host of the party snapped—Where is the copy of that woman’s book—to which his wife responded—there—pointing to an end table on the far side of the room.

   The man went over, snatched the book, went to the kitchen, and returned, book in hand, along with a lighter. He laid the book on the dinner table, as if it were a sacrificial offering to lost gods, to recalled gods. He flipped open the cover. Clicking the lighter, a slender flame danced upward, which he then set against the edge of a page. The page darkened, assuming an ebony char, but wouldn’t burn. The lighter fell from the man’s suddenly slack hand. The lighter clacked when it hit the wooden floor. Nobody moved. Fear became the room temperature. The man suggested what they were all thinking, without saying a word. They rose from their chairs, and walked out in the straightest of lines.  

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Lip Service

Posted on December 3, 2025 by John Biscello

There are the words on the lips of God, nodes and fables of the Unsayable, but Godlike lips have been hyper-inflated with collagen, have been altered and impaired by simulation and synthetic progress. God’s lips have been grossly fattened, blubbery dodos on a steady diet of fish and chips. They have been turned into the latest member of the Kardashians. We watched God’s lips enter the show, and they were treated like every other pair of flooded lips … the Unsayable was no longer a relevant topic. Or rather it was a topic buried beneath an avalanche of diversionary patter, a stream-bubble of parroting that, at its milky core, registered a crippling fear of not being seen or being seen but not being seen enough, there weren’t enough eyes to go around, so the order of the day became the eyes of others and how to keep them pinned like frantic butterflies impaled on a cork board … the Unsayable became the Unmarketable. Projected for its lowest ratings since Golgotha, God’s lips packed up and transplanted to an underground face. Meanwhile, on the low road to nowhere, ratings remained higher than ever.

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Room

Posted on December 2, 2025 by John Biscello

   She was an avid writer of obscure texts. Her obscure texts, which related to identity, language and alienation, rendered the topics as and through compound fractures. She adopted the brokenness and mirrored it obscurely in brokenness. Self/reflecting through heretical shards. Hr syntax was snapped twigs and pulverized bones. Where once were words was white dust and smithereens caving to wind. In the old days they might have called her a witch for conjuring such a spell. In the new days she was called a witch, though not in so many words, but in different words and silences wearing disguises and pitchforks.

   Her obscure texts had been sewn into a book and that book was published and one week after that book was published this woman was raped, strangled, and bludgeoned to death in a building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. What was this building? What was she doing there?

   The man who committed this abomination was the building’s custodian. This man turned this woman into a disaster, a back-page. The woman was originally from South Korea. She spoke three languages: Korean, French and English. I wish I could remember the woman’s name. I can’t. They took it away. These kind of mental records are erased these days. You may recall fragments of what happened, you may recall the broad strokes of bludgeon, rape, and strangulation, but the person upon whom these violences were committed, that person’s name … those things are taken away through their procedures. Their, as in they, as in I don’t-know-who … I have never known.

   People gripe and complain about obscure texts, but there is a far more dangerous and insidious obscurity at play involving they and them, and the thorny relationship between pronouns and procedures. Her name is gone, but what remains: rape, strangulation, bludgeon.

   I do not know much about this woman. I have told you everything I know. I wish the questioning would end, wish they would let me out of this room, they. They told me to speak, to write, as if no one was listening, but how can I do that when I know they are listening and watching. It reminds me of the command people sometimes give when taking a photo: Act natural. As soon as you start to act, isn’t that the end of naturalness?

   They have seized the woman’s book of obscure texts, but I have memorized most of it by heart. When I say memorized by heart, I do not mean that I can echo the text verbatim, what I mean is that my heart has absorbed the essence of the book, in the way a sponge absorbs water. Strangulation, bludgeoning, rape. These are brutal words, darkened windows that open onto slates of hell. I just remembered something else. The woman was married. If I were the woman’s husband and I received word that my wife had been murdered, and these words were used in relation to her murder, how would I process that? There must be a lot in this world that goes unprocessed, because somehow we keep going on, and we keep doing these things that make processing a peril and impossible scar.

   Someone mentioned a river for lost souls. Maybe the woman’s name is there. When they let me out of this room, if they let me out of this room, I will begin my search.

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Horizon

Posted on December 2, 2025 by John Biscello

Longing’s end goal is itself, though it will never admit that. To admit that would strip Longing of its impetus and bait, would render it flatfooted in its futile race against time. Longing is habitually wired to attach its fevers and fires to an end-goal not itself—an object, person, place, dream—something that can fulfill the role of necessary motive and Grail-tease. In reality, though, longing is only and always chasing its own tail. Its desire to devour is the endless tale of Ouroboros devouring its own tail. Desire is self-perpetuating, and whatever causes or goals it takes aim at or adheres to, are arbitrary and interchangeable. They all serve the same function as catalytic agitators, or distances eloping with horizon lines.  

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Homesickness

Posted on December 2, 2025 by John Biscello

   What is that feeling?

   Allow me to cite certain examples which attempt, in vain, to touch upon the vagaries of that sensation, that feeling. It is like longing to be at home when you are already at home. It is as if you are not feeling enough at home. That there is more home to your home, hidden somewhere, something that is missing, perhaps there is a secret door or portal that would open up into the second home, or other home, or sub-home you had been seeking (the home-within-the-home). This longing for home exacts an unparalleled gravitational tug … it is the haunt which afflicts us most deeply. Everything we do, every thought we have, every voice we hear, every desire we burn, every longing we ache, is born from and contains within it traces and vestiges of homesickness. It’s the wanderer’s plague, the wayfarer’s spite, the nomad’s agony. Novalis said all philosophy is homesickness. Thomas Wolfe said we are all exiles and outcasts here. This is why you can be at home, while desiring to be more at home, to feel more at home—there must be more mother behind mother, more father behind father, there must be more home to this home, there must be ultimates with whom we can develop intimate rapport.

   Now, in tilting the scale in a different direction: It’s like wanting to fuck someone so bad while you are fucking them. It is as if the feeling is not consummating, or rather is not commensurate with the depth and intensity of desire—this is what makes people want to devour each other, why our passion to consume, after having consumed, leaves us hungrier than ever. Imagine this: you are having sex with someone while imagining what it would be like to have sex with that person, as if you were not already having sex with that person (in real-time) … you are, while in a state of consummation in a state of anticipation, the ol’ double-edged sword of fantasy and action … in other words, the consummation did not, as you expected, efface or eradicate the sense of anticipation which held you, but rather, perversely, anticipation has been considerably heightened by consummation, as is there was a layer of anticipation beneath anticipation which only comes to the surface when the first layer of anticipation has been exploded by consummation—it is the anticipation-consummation-anticipation sandwich, not to be found in any deli or restaurant, and that second anticipation brings with it longing for greater deeper consummation while you are in the energetic midst of consummation (this being a sandwich that can have many more levels than the simple A-C-A equation I just mentioned). This how and why this state of longing grows in scope and complexity, as you amass an assortment of details when filtering your stringent longing through a projection lens, for example: I am having sex with her, yet I can’t wait to have sex with her, and I am nervous and excited about next weekend when we get together, if we get together—your mind now accumulating details in architecting a fantasy which is superimposed over present reality—you and she are having sex—but you can’t wait to have sex with her, as if you are not having sex with her, never had sex with her, and how might it all play out when that first time arrives again, never, and how will it unfold when you finally get to consummate what is, in essence, unconsummatable.  

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Words and Silence

Posted on December 1, 2025 by John Biscello

There’s no one left to finger, no one left to blame.

Someone sang that. I wish I had sung that. I didn’t. I echo. I am echoes proliferating like genetically disturbed rabbits. Maybe neurodivergent rabbits copulating is a better term, I don’t know. I am made of echoes and uncomfortable silences. Uncomfortable because they demand to be heard, demand to be outed. Echoes can be really mean uncles. Or dictators with steel prods. The words are a placeholder for being here, for staying here. They go where I can’t. Where I won’t.

In the preferred company of words, a slow monarchy and infirmary is formed. Words paper over silence and wounds. Something about the dark blesses us.

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Road Test

Posted on December 1, 2025 by John Biscello

   I spent a great deal of my twenties canned inside the dank sweaty armpit of travel Americana: Greyhound. My longstanding affair with Greyhound was born from a blended cocktail of economics and innate romanticism. As a young man with limited means at my disposal, bus travel was the most cost-efficient option. And my innate romanticism, which at the time constituted about ¾ of my psychic terrain, found its catalytic instigator and emissary in Jack Kerouac.

   I had discovered Kerouac, by chance, when I was nineteen. I had been working as an editorial assistant at Families First, a parenting magazine located in Greenwich Village. One of my favorite things to do during lunch breaks was to pop into bookstores in the neighborhood—Strand, Shakespeare & Co., Barnes & Noble—or to browse the offerings of the booksellers lining the sidewalks. I had grown up in Bensonhurst, a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, where I continued to live, but my integration into city life, and specifically Greenwich Village, had given me a whole new lens through which to perceive the world, and my place in it.

   On that afternoon, I had gone to Tower Records, and on the lower level there was a section that carried a modest inventory of books and magazines. I saw the novel, On the Road, picked it up, read its back cover synopsis, and bought it. I had no idea who Jack Kerouac was, knew nothing about the Beat Generation. My reading selections up to that point, aside from that which had been assigned to me in school (and “assigned” reading material, no matter what it was, usually felt bereft of a certain joy, a certain curious warmth and timbre, than came to me when I picked or discovered books on my own, outside of school), had primarily been comic books, Choose-Your-Own Adventures, the Hardy Boys, horror stories, mysteries, crime novels, and serial killer biographies. My house was not in the least bit a literary one: my father read local newspapers and album liner notes, my mother read self-help books.

   I started reading On the Road during my train ride back to Brooklyn, and as always happens with first love: its stamp was immediate and irrevocable. I zipped through the book in a couple of days and when I was done I was running a very high and happy fever. I was hot and giddy with inspiration. I was in that agreeably woozy state, which I would experience again later on with books like Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller), Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse), The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (William Saroyan), and Ask the Dust (John Fante), in which I felt like my brain-breaths had been stopped in their tracks, or were in a state of exalted suspension. I hadn’t known writing could be like that: the velocity, the verve, the musical livingness of it. The language wasn’t just telling about and describing things, it was the thing itself, reflecting and exuding its womb-goo and exodus, its vital essence. And for me, who had spent a lot of time with Spider-Man and Joe Hardy and Charles Manson, this Kerouac was something brand-new and different, yet magnetically familiar.

   Thoughts of traveling, of hitting the road had been ballooning inside me for several years, and Kerouac’s flood had broken me open. I felt ready to go. While my job at the magazine was a good one, with opportunities for advancement, I had discovered within my first month at the magazine that I had no desire to be a journalist, nor to climb the editorial ladder. I was obsessed with one thing: Experience. Experience, at the time, signified this magic abstract tangible, a matrimonial grail that if you quested hard and long enough, with the proper context of vision, you could find and hold and have. In a nutshell, my goal was to go out and find experience, as if accumulating pieces of gold, accumulate as much of it as you can, until you are filthy-rich with material. Then, convert your currency into words, into writing, and its value will be recognized and appreciated by the world-at-large.

   Looking back at this nineteen-year-old, a wide-eyed babe greedily suckling Kerouac’s vision-engorged tit, throbbing with a sense of preordained destiny, I have to laugh, but my laugh is an easy and generous one. I’d root for this kid, and kids like him everywhere, any day. The beauty in foolishness is something that remains both legend and testament lodged warmly in my heart, and I hope I’m still saying that when I’m seventy, when I’m ninety, when I’m beyond marking the passage of time.

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Premature Nostalgia

Posted on December 1, 2025 by John Biscello

   Ever since I can remember, I have been afflicted by what I call premature nostalgia. A simple definition of premature nostalgia: Mourning or grieving, or experiencing acutely a deep sense of loss, a profound wistfulness, ether before something happens or while it is happening.

   Case in point: I am holding my lover’s hand. Deep-sea-dreaming in her eyes. Kissing her. While one, or two, or three of these things are happening, I am experiencing, in a deeply felt sense, presence and absence simultaneously. I am missing my lover while I am with her—there is a congruent overlay and meshing of timelines. I grieve for what is gone, what has left me, while I possess it, yet perversely relish what I possess while grieving. None of these feelings are mutually exclusive. They are bound together in a quivering, amniotic bundle.

   Years ago, when I was younger, I was eating a sandwich—turkey, cheese and mustard—that my grandmother had made for me, when I was traveling from New York to wherever it was I was going. I was in Penn Station, sitting on a bench, and I unwrapped my sandwich from its tin foil (the sandwich was smooshed and bleeding thick gloppy mustard around the edges), and before I took my first bite—just holding the sandwich, feeling its weight and texture, its thing-ness in my hand, staring at it—the sandwich was gone, my grandmother gone, and suddenly a wave of tender sadness coursed through me, and when I took my first bite of the sandwich, it tasted so good, good in a way that made me feel intensely grateful and want to cry. I wasn’t just eating a sandwich, I was eating the memory of a sandwich, its sentimental and edible ghost, which was energetically connected to my grandmother, her care and solicitousness, my grandmother both living and dead in that liminal moment.  

   I had often wondered what was that sensation that had the power to move me so deeply, and then I discovered the term mono no aware, which I realized was the sibling counterpart to premature nostalgia. Mono no aware is a Japanese term, not so much a creed or concept, as it is a sense-of-life. Here are several definitions:

  1. Sensitivity to the sadness of impermanence
  2. A gentle, sorrow-tinged appreciation of transitory beauty
  3. An emotion of tender affection, in which there is both passion and sympathy … in such moments the sentiment is instinctively felt, for in them joy mingles with a kind of agreeable melancholy.

   I was floored when I read that—agreeable melancholy. Not sad in some bad or negative sense—a sadness born of being human, feeling human. Tender and resigned, supple and bittersweet, the twilight room of one’s inner chamber, a soloist in a choir born to sing the blues.

The following are some examples in Japanese literature, which characterize the spirit of mono no aware. The first is a passage from Essays in Idleness, a 15th century work produced by a man named Kenko.

“Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be aware of the passing of spring—these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. In all things it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.”

Next up a poem from Zen poet, Ryokan:

“Early summer—floating down a clear running river

in a wooden boat,

a lovely girl gently plays with a crimson lotus flower

held in her white hands.

The day becomes more and more brilliant.

Young men play along the shore

and a horse runs by the willows.

Watching, quietly, speaking to no one,

the beautiful girl does not show that her heart is broken.”

And, lastly, a creature and its song, emblematic of mono no aware:

“The song of the hototogisu, the little Japanese cuckoo, is usually heard at dusk. It is considered not only beautiful, but also slightly sad; the other names for the hototogisu are—’bird of the other world’ and ‘bird of disappointed love.'”

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Paper Route

Posted on December 1, 2025 by John Biscello

   It’s hard when you live in a paper town. You see the other kids, the real ones, playing at the linen edges, the cloth borders, and you want to interact with them but you can’t cross over. There is no existing bridge, no gateway or portal, which would allow you to cross from where you are to where they are. It’s agonizing, because you can see and hear them, but it as if there is impassable glass, thick as impossible, between your world and theirs. I can only get so close to where they are before a surge of blurring overtakes me and I wind up back where I was, staring at them. It’s like being at the mercy of a magnetic rewind.

   The kids show no signs of seeing me, or knowing that I exist. They play their games—hopscotch, ring-o-levio, double dutch, freeze tag—without every looking in my direction, without ever showing the least sign that they are aware of a world right next to theirs.

   My father explained to me, more than once, that’s just how it goes when you live in a paper town. He is very cut-and-dry about the whole thing. You exist only for and in relation to other people who live in the same paper town as you. You can see the others, in the place that we called Overside, but connections and mergers were impossible. When I asked my father how we came to be in our town, which was called Avnoste, he shrugged—Beats me. My father was here before me, and his father was here before him, and so on. How our ancestors first came to be here, I have no idea.

   My father’s lack of curiosity regarding our origins irritated me. It wasn’t just my wanting to play with the kids from Overside (I had friends of my own, but they were paper town friends, that somehow felt less substantial, less vital, than the Oversiders), it was also the fact that everyone accepted, as wholesale gospel, that we couldn’t cross from Avnoste to Overside. I wanted to show everyone that these laws weren’t unbreakable, that there was a way to bypass this seemingly impenetrable barrier. But how? Too much of my time had been spent staring at the kids from Overside, and longing and wishing and hoping to be able to join in their games, and I had not given enough time to making my dreams a reality. Not anymore. I would do everything in my power to cross over. Every vanishing harbors a rogue pioneer.

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