John Biscello

I won’t call this a book because no one reads books anymore, no one gives two shits and a dime about books. I’ll call this an exalted and long overdue mania, a catalytic inversion, a freebase purge. Whatever, whatever. Voyeurs now live and lurk elsewhere. So one such as myself is freed up to roam with my pants down, with hopes that lighting will come down hard and sizzle my crotch. Once every generation or so, a crotch is lightning-fried, cruci-fried, then duly forgotten. So be it. So be it has become my stopwatch and slapstick. I disavowed permanence a thousand years ago, and in the thousand years since it has been one long droning spell of bewitchment, rubbing two sticks together to teach a mirror the meaning of fire. So be it. After all, newly formed landscape and it accompanying ruins have become my pyramid and playground, lonely yes, but at least I can walk around with my pants down. This is not a book, not the beginning of something that hopes to one day grow up and become a book, books, all books died in a childbirth holocaust many moons ago, midwives fled the scene screaming for order, orders from the top never arrived, and books flopped and floated belly-up like swollen dead fish in a salty grave of a sea. It started with imbecilic stuttering, a chorus of apelike tremolos, which morphed into mirror-hawking parakeets, followed by lightless dead-eyed stares at navels, crotches, ankles … never eyes. Eyes stopped meeting eyes. Without eyes, the extinction of books was one of innumerable side effects. No longer seeing eye to eye, the lot became eyeless, and the eyeless had zero interest in reading books, and less than zero interest in writing them. So be it. My misguided intention is to invent a caravan of solitudes, a circus of nobodies, or degenerates of vagabondage, on and on, some invented group or another through which I can warm my loneliness by the proverbial fire. To think, that I once dreamed … to hell with that. You know what I found? A child’s broken heart, and therein its fields of dreaming, no, not a child’s broken heart, children’s broken hearts, a glaring multitude, leaks sapwater which is favored by trees. There is no purer liquid on earth than that which derives from children’s broken hearts, hence the strategically aimed slaughter and clustering sport of carnage. The barbarians have long since advanced beyond the gate. Your blood, and your children’s children’s blood, is on their hands. They move about freely, red-handed, a proud race of barn-burning rapists. I live here, waxing, waning, in my regal hovel, my christlike fallout, and and words keep wording, the idiotic bubbling up like furious snails, I place them where I can, I imagine the others I can’t see listening, someone must be listening, and caught in these wheels between here and not, now and when, I insist to no one listening that this is not a book, I say this again and again, etching my vigor in troubled air, again and again trusting that fool’s gold bears value of some sort, this can’t be a book because all that tripe and jazz ended long ago and can never begin again, never, ever, though maybe, perhaps, under certain unforeseen conditions … no, don’t start with all that nonsense again: leave Pandora to her ashes and anal weathering.