Screen Test

Posted on October 7, 2026 by John Biscello

If cinema is a tomb, then let us die watching. The angel over my shoulder is hunched, opaque, morphing.

None of us ever leave behind the darkened theater. We are here, always. Sanctuary, haven, enclave, respite, sitting tight and homey with reels of flickering filmstrips to keep us warm hazy company. We remain here, happy slaves and obedient imps to the dance between light and shadow. We don’t care what films are pimped out to us. Every genre becomes our appetite.

Cinemanesthasized. That is us, what we have become. A bewitching trance in which we fondle and romance our tethered wrecks and deepest secret selves.

It is no coincidence that tomb and womb are so close to one another, phonetic cousins kissing in the dark.

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Genre-Bending

Posted on October 7, 2026 by John Biscello

Historyless is where I come from, the sun-crotched navel, the part of me not yet born, the part of me dead to the world on its way to being born into the potholes and foothills of unimagined fictions. Fiction or fictions are suspended sentences. Suspended between what we perceive and report to be real, and what is not. Perception is the stepchild of morph.

I am, in this dank dreamless station, waiting to be born, waiting to discover, what I mean is uncover, all an uncovering and remembering, re-membering by definition is membering beyond the vagabondage back to the I-never-borning I-never-dying.

On the cosmic level, there are no tears. Dry windless worlds beaconing light to anoint the variations on selves cycling through and through, no end to selves sounding a concert, selves in a slideshow alone-feeling yet connected-teeming. This, the crisis of phenomena, daring is to be what is. The blue breath of want chastises mirrors. Nowhere as in the present moment and now-here. Language equal parts glyphic and syphilitic as it traffics sublimely in warmest belongings and hints.

I, in the dank dreamless station, native votives in blue and gray, I am waiting to be born, and the world that follows will be one of prevailing fictions, a succession of plot twists in a long dreadful line of penny-ante suspense, potboilers, pulp, red herrings, and reversals of cause.

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Chelsea Hotel #3

Posted on October 7, 2026 by John Biscello

We Are Ugly But We Have the Music.

This is our title, our collective moniker, our flagless flag, denominating no allegiances, no cultural attachments, no geo-political persuasions. None of that. We dwell underground, or to be more accurate, the underground lives inside us, and our voices have taken on the mineral timbre, metallic resin, diamond dust dreams, and whetted clay lips of the underground swelling and rising.

Many do not view us. We are not pleasingly viewable, not well-documented, not registered for countless likes or repeated downloads. We Are Ugly But We Have the Music.

We gather under the auspices of this tagged birth and nomenclature, and beneath us the earth is always at the mercy of shifting tectonic plates. Protean are our takes. And we play, we play on.

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Titanic

Posted on October 6, 2026 by John Biscello

If there were two, then let us say there were two. The two danced on the time-haunted deck of the Titanic, they called it the Titanic because they understood the floor beneath their feet was not to be trusted, nor the worldscape which was always at the mercy of shifting tectonic plates. Here today, gone tomorrow. Gone tomorrow, here today. A courtier’s ceaseless shifting of nodes. She, one of the two, lowered herself upon the creak-wooden floor and blew him. She rose up, musky penile skinflakes clinging to her lips, and he, the other of the two, lowered down and blew her. They swapped out organs liberally, as they saw fit, they were measurably reciprocal in their take and give. They blew each other back and forth seesaw-style because they loved each other, because wind was their mentor and silence their grace, because they desired to become immaculately vulgar, they blew each other because the fate of every Titanic was inescapable, they blew each other because they were two. There might have been others. They didn’t see them. She was she was a mother once, possibly twice. He said he had played a child at least a thousand times. Every generation slips a knot. The blue want of the world was hunger impossible, or desperate flights from hunger impossible. He wet the tip of his finger and plugged it inside her ear, conceiving of ear as he did this, imagining it a bright clay appendage, a tender mollusk. She removed her ear and replaced it with wax candy lips, a Cubist invention of her own volition. They, the two, devoured each other historically, simultaneously. The world had gone and unimaginably stayed gone. They were two, and they were. It was enough. The most concise and satisfying math equation ever. To be there and to be gone. To be simultaneous and to be absent. They found all this out by dreaming through and through. I mean dreaming that went all the way through, no turning back. Imagine, if you will, two tiny O-shaped mouths like goldfish puckers, suckers for absorption, and therein lies the mystery, gremlins and vast greening ponderances of life. Once upon a time…

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Pandora

Posted on October 6, 2026 by 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 lightning 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 profusely to teach a mirror the meaning of fire. So be it. After all, newly formed landscape and its accompanying ruins have become my pyramid and playground, my cradle and fallout. Lonely, perhaps, but at least I can walk around with my pants down.

This is not a book, not the beginning of something that one day hopes to 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 the salty grave of sea.

It started with imbecilic stuttering, a chorus of apelike tremolos, which morphed into mirror-hawking parakeets, followed by lightless dead-eyed gapes 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, leaking 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 words keep on 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.

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Monkeys and Barrels

Posted on October 6, 2026 by John Biscello

   None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while. Both things were true. Both could be beginnings. So let’s go with both: None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while.

I felt like a dehydrated man wandering aimlessly in a wasteland of publishing. To clarify: the publishing industry being the wasteland. Then, a chance. A dehydrated man wandering aimlessly in a desert lives for chances. Which is why the tease of mirages prove to be the death of many.

   Anyway, a chance: I had an appointment with the V.P. of the big publisher C.C. Burton. My friend, Lana, a fellow writer, who always backed and supported my work, had wrangled the appointment with Elaine, the V.P., who was an old friend of hers.

   Elaine, like myself, was of Italian-American heritage. Elaine, like myself, was from Brooklyn. And because my novel was a crooked valentine to the Brooklyn of my youth, Lana thought that it might be a perfect fit for Elaine’s sensibility. It sounded promising. Most mirages do. They glitter in the daytime and disappear in the twilight. Of course, it’s always twilight when you arrive at the mirage. I’m sure Einstein could explain it. Anyway, the meeting.

   I stepped into Elaine’s posh office. I saw a smallish woman dressed in a pale lavender suit seated behind a massive desk. Her hair was sculpted high. I wondered if she had sculpted it with Aqua Net. Was there still Aqua Net? Had it been banned by the Ozone Commission? My grandmother had petrified her hair on a daily basis with Aqua Net. My grandmother was long dead. Not because of the Aqua Net, mind you. Elaine appeared to be in her late fifties, early sixties. Definitely of the Aqua Net generation.

   Mister Fillameno, Elaine said, please sit down.

   I sat down in a wooden chair, facing her. I felt as if I were at the principal’s office, and was about to be reprimanded for something I had done wrong in class. Which was often how I felt. Especially when seated across from vice presidents with sculpted hair and lavender suits. Which was not often.

   Elaine and I chatted. About Brooklyn. About no longer living in Brooklyn (I had expatriated to Nine Peaks, a small town in New Mexico, twenty years ago). We chatted about this and that, a casual volley, which led to my novel. And why she was passing on it.

   You’re obviously a very talented writer, she said, and then highlighted what she loved about the book—the characters were incredibly nuanced and layered, particularly Anya in her tragic sadness. Yet, and it was a big yet—YET—the novel is too short to publish, especially by an unknown author. She needed a novel with more meat on its bones, more heft and bulk, if she were going to peddle it.

   I don’t remember if she actually used the word peddle but that’s what I heard—peddle. Which made me think of hot dogs peddled by vendors at Yankee Stadium. Or a BMX racer with glow-in-the-dark-pedals. Elaine went on about pacing, character development, length, which then tied into prevailing marketing trends, and that’s when I cut her off.

   I don’t write for the market. I write for the angels. And for God.

   Where had that come from? I had never thought of myself as writing for the angels. And God. But it felt true when I said it.

   I could tell Elaine didn’t like being cut off, especially right in the middle of her dissertation on prevailing marketing trends. She pursed her lips tightly. They grew ashen, then pallid. Mortuary. I thought a touch of lipstick could revive them.

   Lipstickless, Elaine sniped—That is all well and noble, Mister Fillameno, but I can assure you that God isn’t running the market. And he isn’t the one who will publish your books.

   I didn’t know what to say. Elaine had me over a barrel. Was that the right saying? Had me over a barrel? Why a barrel? And wasn’t there something about monkeys and barrels?

   Good luck to you, Elaine clipped, letting me know that our meeting was officially over and I should exit her office.

   I stood up to leave, disoriented. I was still thinking about God and the angels. And monkeys and barrels. I hadn’t yet caught up to the present moment, to what was happening. I was leaving. Was meant to be leaving.

   Good day, sir, Elaine said, as a sort of nudge to get me moving.

    I left Elaine’s office.

   Walked the length of the carpeted hallway.

    To the elevator.

   Took it down to the lobby.

   Walked the marble floor to the glass revolving doors.

   And stepped out onto the teeming daytime sidewalk. I felt as if I had just vacated one dream, and entered another.

   It felt good to be back in New York. It had been a while. And none of it was going anywhere.

   I started walking. I thought of previous rejections of my work, filing through the internalized catalog. Too short. Too long. Too obscure. Too much this, not enough that. It’s always something, as the late great Gilda Radner would gripe. Yes, sir, back in New York. Just another pinballing speck in the shadow of anonymity. In the shadow of monolithic buildings. This made me happy and sad. I wasn’t a young man anymore. Expect I was. Einstein could explain it. 

   You’ve got plenty left in the tank, kid. I often referred to myself, in the third person, as kid. It was a Babe Ruth thing. He called everyone kid, no matter what their age. Apparently because he could never remember anyone’s name.

   Babe Ruth. There was a man who defied the odds. A cigar-smoking, hot dog-gobbling, beer-swilling giant who announced himself to the world as legend.

   Who cares about age, I told myself. There’s no such thing as time anyway. Live as if you’re already dead. Then, and only then, will you come to fully embrace life and experience truer freedom.

   What had happened to me? Somewhere along the way I had lost my nerve. My moxie and chutzpah. Parts of me, perhaps a bit punch-drunk, had gone into hiding. They didn’t want to get hit anymore. I understood. I sympathized with those parts. I had become a dormouse on a ledge. Or a vagrant Buddha standing on the street corner in the rain. Parts of me had.

   Yet today, today something in me, something that had been walled up and dammed, had broken open. I owed it to Elaine. Her passive-aggressive assault on God and the angels. Her faith in prevailing marketing trends. Her use of the word peddle.

I walked the streets of New York that afternoon, feeling pissed off. Feisty. Ready to take on all comers. I felt completely ready to let all my monkeys out of their barrels. Just to see them dance.

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Sure Shot

Posted on October 6, 2026 by John Biscello

Out here/in here

cradling the air. Hugging its hot pissy whatever. Something to hold onto something to grasp. This is maintenance at its most base level. If I let go I will be scooped up again, a helpless dollop in timepsanning batter and crunch.

The batter both bleached and midnightlike, a doughy hellacious mountain that heaves and collapses and asks no questions.

Dough don’t talk.

Manna be mouthless.

Mum’s the word.

Silence carves and underscores the wafting arabesque spirals of piss n vinegar hook-tugging my nostrils cartoonesque. This world a bloodbath tombtub filling up with dark mysterious matter.

Some unnamed is nasty and known. Some unknown. I name things as fast as I can. Mania is my talent and bane.

Like blowing air into ruptured balloons, again and again, never-ending rounds of air thinning out and in out and in, blowing nowhere fast. In other words, I can’t name everything. In other words, the same as these words yet somehow different, I can’t name everything.

Variations and classes fail yet nobly attempt. There is a twist to all this. In mirror only we show off our chromosomal ache. Here our minds are slow to realize the fast-track phantoms and grails barreling through and through. It is like looking down the eyetooth of a loaded shotgun, one of them kapow blooey jobs that leaves brains staining audible walls and ears ringing.

I call for someone or something or some other thing. It is some other thing I’ve always wanted, some other thing the red-eyed night-hawk circling above my head, and circling, in predatory orbit. I keep calling. If only is my mantra and cruciform. They warned me not to long. Do not long, they said repeatedly. It is the surest road to misery. We possess no antidote, no cure.

In this respect my roads have grown weary of want. Footfalls scuffed and worn. Distances close in on distances and we grow minutely claustrophobic. Subtitles become our cinema as we speak no more or very little.

Do not question or long, they warned. I grow anxious and name things. There is a false quality of forever in this naming. The naming is not memory. It is the opposite of memory. It is fable and mercy applied tenderly to mirage-making. I long to return to all things sublime, to move beyond fallout and shrine. But, no, you cannot, you are on a mission. I hear this in my head again and again, you are on a mission, the gospel-hissing voice reminds me. You are not here to piss on walls or piss off. Your mission is something else. The original instructions and directions have been lost. Or perhaps erroneously misplaced. No matter the score, you must carry on with this thing that’s been named mission. The mission could rate anywhere from high priority to utterly delusional, but you must carry on, go on naming, go on longing (even though we warned you), and understand that you are not falling, you are miming the slo-mo descent of someone else falling, in-and-out of love with live theater perpetrating both the absurd and highly realistic, it’s a swing-thing that requires staying tuned all the way through and around.  

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Swimming Lessons

Posted on October 6, 2026 by John Biscello

My mother’s face. The bladed cheekbones, the dancer’s neck, the crowded eyes. What about the rest of her? My mother carried within herself gothic mass, sclerotic and stillborn, the dead child of motherless. Motherless lived inside my mother, beside her. In these motherless places dark things grew, which I would liken to empty swimming pools overrun by weeds and spiky grass sprouting from cracks and fissures, a hothouse for entropy. My mother was an empty swimming pool, a hollowed-out cavity where swimming was forbidden. When you see a waterless pool, knowing you can’t swim in it, what do you do? What I did was stare and stare, becoming a pair of haunted desperate eyes, and used my imagination to fill the pool with water, a mirage submerged. I cannot count how many times I drowned inside my mother. Or rather inside her motherless places, grip-locked.

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To No End

Posted on October 5, 2026 by John Biscello

I had a decision to make. The world was ending, again. It had ended several times before. To be more accurate: many worlds had ended many times. Anyway, on one hand, there was the imminent end of the world, a proof of concept with viral streaming capacity. And then there was my desk, where I was sitting. I’d say about 22 1/3 of my life had spent sitting at this desk, and more than half my life had been spent sitting at a desk, many desks compounded into a single archetypal desk. So there I was, sitting at my desk, news of the world ending circulating like toxic motes and mosquito-drone … what was I supposed to do? I did what I had done so many other times before. And hope to keep doing after the world ends again (and again). I wrote. I was rote and habitually ritual in that respect. I sat down at my desk every day and wrote. You say hell is freezing over? Put on your overcoat, pick up your pen, and write about it. Or write about heaven, or purgatory, or childhood, while hell freezes over. A plague is spreading and claiming countless lives, you say? Pray and write. Or don’t pray and write. But write. Writing to me is the energetic equivalent of playing music. I intend to keep making music, come hell or high water, come Amazon disaster or A.I. mindrape. Keep at it. Trust in the words and process, even when the ship is sinking or especially when the ship is sinking. You will die in real-time. Your heart will break in real-time. But your words will resound within timeless. These are not only lyrics to go (nod to the Tribe), but lyrics that go on and on. Same as the music. Same as all creative, life-breeding acts. There is a dizzying limitlessness to the whole thing. You will die within the enclosure of strict limits. You are immortal within limitlessness. The world is ending (again). Its glaciers carving scythes. There is a tag slated for your big toe. Gravity is prattling on about morass and void, its two favorite words. The world is ending. Okay, then: can you sit at your desk and complete a sentence? Good. Can you add a sentence to the first one, and then another? Excellent. Soon you have a paragraph. Can you keep doing this, your desk anchored and aligned to the greatest moveable feast you will ever know, hatched from words that dream and dance to no end. Think about that. Words dancing and dreaming to no end in a world ending. The world ends. The words don’t. The dancing don’t. The dreaming don’t. Stack your don’ts into a creative yes. A resounding yes. That is why I am sitting here at this desk, writing. I have made my decision for today. Tomorrow’s decision is worlds away.

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Accompanying Tune

Posted on October 5, 2026 by John Biscello

In this mutable and concave room, this purveyor of nimbus and cradle, shapeshifting occurs at a phenomenal rate. The room alters its dimensions, and I in turn am altered. It is reciprocal harmony and symbiotic intimacy. The room is significantly empathic. It tunes to me, my needs, my secret and deep-down longing. From this raw and fetal material, means for travel and modes of departure are arrived at. The room is the ultimate agency for travel, specifically for what you might call placeless travel, hard-wired to my wants and desires. In this regard, the room is a genetic whisperer and mind-reader. It knows exactly what to say and do. It is, in an abstract sense, the double of my autobiography. It has traversed lengths of me I have yet to go to, or reach, parlaying reconnaissance into a customized road map. I can leave the room, but really I’m never outside it, because the room remains inside me always, and I it. There is the physical space defined as “the room,” but there is also the metaphysical character of the room that is inside me. The physical room can be exited, but not the metaphysical one. Where would it go? Where would I go? I would leave the room only to end up right back inside the room. Is it all the same room? Or is it a different one I enter after exiting? The only answer I’ve come up with so far regarding that: same same different.

I suspect that the room, unlike my organism, is immune to entropy. It is a room that, if vacated, would simply relocate. It would go where it was needed, and attach itself accordingly. I know this much—without the room, I would not have been written by the author who has obsessively stalked me since childhood. I used to think of this author not as author, but as a panther or wolf whose sole objective was to catch and devour me. I figured I was the Road Runner to its Wile E. Coyote. And in never getting caught, this Roadrunner-Coyote analogy only deepened and solidified. Then I realized it was no wild animal wanting to devour me, it was an author that wanted to track my every move so as to keep me written, to contain me as existential proof and test study. Since birth, or more than likely before birth (as I believe this author’s stalking preceded my delivery date into this world, the akashic length of karmic stalking, if you will), I was assigned an author, and that author would need a room in which he, I, it could exist in a mad lab of co-habitation. I was part of an ongoing equation. They say the demons have a harder time tracking you down if you keep moving. I kept moving but also I was inside the room that was inside of me. In other words, I went nowhere. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The room provided plenty of space for both travel and staying put. Or I should say the travel of staying put. In this respect, the more put you stayed, the further you traveled, or could travel. These were the governing principles and basic physics of the room. It took me many years to understand this. And I still can’t say I really understand it. Mostly I’ve acclimated to it. I am, as always, inside this room, being written and unfinished. Unfinishable. This thorny incompleteness keeps me musing on both the room and its author as accompanists to solitude.

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