John Biscello

In the cinema, hypnotized. I died a drugged and stupefied death again and again, crucified by the diminished returns of flickering images. I die, tranquilized, a sweetly solemn refugee from reality. This is the escapist way, its creed. Why pretend otherwise? Why justify? It has always been about escape. Escape from long withheld screams inflating black balloons in one’s stomach, escape from silence and jargon that says nothing and does so relentlessly, escape from so-called advances and progressions, escape from stories and shows that never quit. Reruns are all there is. If you see yourself playing yourself again and again and again, it is because you are the prey and primary chess-piece of syndication.

Where am I now? I am standing at an imaginary crossroads, picking navel from my lint and calling it starstuff. When the words come, they come from elsewhere, hail from god knows where, I sing them, I spit them, I drool unabashedly as proof of music. If there is God, he is sure to be found in drool-music. The words amass no plot. None whatsoever. Unless you are talking about cemetery markers. Those are plots tactile in reference.

I am waiting to be born. Waiting here, in the graffitied recesses of a dank station, waiting not so patiently in a state of near-crisis and psychic throb. Too much time spent dancing in my head, the dead devouring the dead, ghosts rounding out the edges. Graveyard gospels demand execution. The music is proof of being, of having been and sung. To drool is a noble function.

Where am I? At the imaginary crossroads, where I am now is what I am now, that is to say a highly sensitive vibrating antenna that sometimes translates frequencies transmitted from wherever, ennobling a hieratical obedience to mystery. I, from where I am standing, am embryonic in all phases at all times. I wish I could do more. I wish I was here. I am an instrument being played through, a broken bough blown through in fugue scatters and prints. When not played through, I feel useless. I miss the singing, the drooling, feel void of purpose. I am immersed in an ongoing recording and orgy of consciousness as a shadow script, as phantom strips of film-reel torn to shreds and carried away by the wind in all directions. I do my best to record what is being recorded. If I somehow appear in what I am recording, that is arbitrary, a side-note, a footnote, a soluble incarnation designed expressly to fade away, each one, each projected self and accompanying shadow, they must die in order to incarnate again and again, each one different yet the same, so you could say different-seeming, there yet not. I am a recitative dummy, a frayed umbilical cord of a mouthpiece with fattened lips.

It, whatever it is, passes through me, and I pass through nothing, near to nothing always.