Bone Jig

Posted on November 11, 2022 by John Biscello

My mother’s bones. My mother’s bones resounding in my ears piercing my eardrums. Death rattle of the dusty gourd. Of the earth’s grief calling to us to restore. Calling upon us to become wardens attendants to vibrations crossing passages. To follow is the only way to move. It being the liminal groove. My mother’s bones resound like echoes in distant corridors like lost colors and I am reminded I am recalled as the goblin child of a clawing rapist. But wasn’t he a poor soul too? Are not all souls poor and blessed and cursed the same as sorry lot? Questions I cannot answer. I can only sing the stains. The ineradicable stains can be sung blame can be transcended maybe transfigured by singing the hell out of the bones maybe. There is this and they are claims. The feelings legacies telling stories all their own. It is in the bones. Yours hers theirs. I must learn to listen to the accursed and blessed with equal ears to the incalculable crises amounting to fractures forming dissent within the self. Now split there are factions and warring within begins. The warring rapist seeded from the deep soil of the warring world within. And so it goes and so it went. How to mend and unify the fractures within the glaring cause of the whole. Not why to but how to. Existential concerns not solely my own but the flagging concerns of one and all. Existential concerns create pressure in a vacuum. In there how to breathe? Not why but how. Inroads in spite of the spite in spite of the faults the fissures the failings the odds. The skeletons assemble to dance a jig at night. The moon fires them up. The dead not an army but a dance troupe. Texts to be read aloud inside your head while no one is listening. This one of the directives hailing from the night. The night has many tongues. Divining many secrets many fates. We the dancing dead are charmed. If music be the proof of love then dance on. Dance on.

Grief attends to the bones. And does so listening to the spaces between the hollows where the ghosts are held hissing where loss compounded by fractures gives rise to near distant voices crying out on behalf of all that’s gone missing. It is matter of tempo of pacing. We do our best to sync up with what has left us what is behind rising again. In this respect the cadence of seances is our lead. We hum we sway. Possessed by the need to move we ask whatever ghost comes our way if we could have this dance. We are incorrigible romantics with a fondness for death warmly pressed.

Maya Deren “Meshes of the Afternoon”

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To No End

Posted on November 11, 2022 by John Biscello

Texts to be read aloud inside your head while no one is listening. This one of the directives we received. We also heard Your ears may start to burn as if a forest fire is burning inside your head a forest of pines burning down to the ground clearing space for new nuptials to seed to spawn. Do not be alarmed. It’s all part of what needs to happen what has happened will happen again. We heard this and wondered if it was in any way connected to texts to be read aloud inside your head while no one is listening. It’s hard to figure out which fractures to match. Seeking symmetries in fractures compounded has become our thing our vocation if you will. Not mending fractures mind you matching them. Because it has been suggested if we match enough of the fractures correctly and by correctly we mean symmetrically mapped then mending will naturally inevitably occur. There is no way of knowing if this voice is right. There are many voices. We try them on like plagiarized rags from a bone shop.

Texts to be read aloud inside your head while no one is listening. It seems that this phrase may be a vagabond originating from the books of hours of longing. To this we must tend carefully patiently playing the roles of wardens with means to no end.

Painting by Jackson Pollock

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All Fours

Posted on November 10, 2022 by John Biscello

We are out here on all fours panting in the sun the bleary merciless maraschino sun burning us. It has been a long while one of those spells that feels foreverish out here in these fields unseen dreaming of god knows what. We are permanently scarred. Some of us suggested we become a group that goes by the name Permanently Scarred maybe a band except none of us sing or play an instrument. I’d say we are disembodied voices except we are on all fours with the sun burning us so something like bodies like skin must be our lot and inheritance. Knowing the void answerless you’d think we’d stop asking questions but we don’t What’s for dinner Where’s the moon Did we do something to deserve this. We ask answerless and listen hoping dreamless. You could call us a sorry bunch but then again not knowing whether finite or infinite there is nothing to assess no one to blame. There’s just on all fours the sun burning unrelenting. If we decide to call ourselves Permanently Scarred maybe one of us will learn to sing so we can earn our name. It’s either that or absolute silence which none of us have yet tried.

Painting by Mark Rothko

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Lasting Born

Posted on November 10, 2022 by John Biscello

Once upon a time is a necessary mirage. Flesh born of lighted word and bones fulfilling myth. Stories are the means to endlessness. They go on and on. We go on and on carried along by stories carrying within them the seeds of the lasting born. In the telling we are told. We are voiced along invisible currents which babble white tongued spirals and cadent intimacies. We being the keepers of the flood. Stories bubble up from under the great weeping the sleepover dreaming spells of multi-versal lives refraining. We clone ourselves as test proofs. We give shape to our voices with alchemy blessing our gist. For days on end we weep with unabashed gratitude for all that ever was or is. We can’t help but weep after having touched the pulpy magnetic core of something so redeemably soft so defenseless. Stories are the means to endlessness. We are the tellers and the told. Once upon a time is a raging mirage by all means necessary.

Edward Hopper “Automat”

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Children of the Moon

Posted on November 10, 2022 by John Biscello

We the motherless fatherless children of the moon wake up dreamless weeping. This is why we seek the all dreaming. The all dreaming is more feeling than place. Sometimes not always but sometimes we are chased by the fates. The fates laugh big round red blood platelet laughs and chase us laughing with scissors. We don’t know what they’ll cut where they’ll cut why they’ll cut if they catch us we’re sure they’ll cut. Someone once wrote It’s like cutting off your faith to spite the universe. I don’t know how that relates to the fates but I believe it does.

We the children of the moon understand that the moon is a cup and we fill it with water and drink laughing madly. When we drink enough moon water we talk about the good old days when we tilted at windmills and rode clanking boxcars. The good old days. We didn’t live them didn’t know them but we became them through the all dreaming. Sometimes in the all dreaming when we are scared we see the flashing of green scissors and hear the blood round laughing and know that the fates are following us. The fates stalk relentlessly their footsteps endless echoes. We bent inward and bending in further still keep ourselves away. We have long specialized in keeping ourselves away. Away is where our angels went whoosh the furious magnificence of their wings when they went. They said in not so may words Stay blessed but we don’t know how. Could the stalking fates be the angels in disguise returning? Could the green flashing scissors and laughing be exactly what we need? To stop running. There are many of us. The motherless fatherless waking up dreamless weeping. Stay blessed the going away angels left us. Then we alone. It’s okay. We the children of the moon of the all dreaming are inevitable. We are myths not yet spoken.

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Keeper of Bones

Posted on November 3, 2022 by John Biscello

Now again I have become my mother’s keeper. Once I saw her sitting out in the yard staring out blankly and when I asked her what she was doing she said she was taking care of the world. She said this very very softly. I didn’t know what she meant then. I do now. I also learned that what we summarize as blank stares are often filled with so much, they are not blank at all but are superficially tagged as such due to laziness and lack of depth in place of scrutiny and insight. My mother was not staring out blankly. She saw something. Many things. Or she saw nothing yet felt many things moving shapeless yet textured, like thistles of fur on the back of wind. She was addressing vagaries. She was taking care of the world.

There is a slow burn that has not yet reached me from my past, from my mother’s bones. My mother’s bone are arsonists. I know this. I keep a safe distance. At night the bones get up and do a dance, dancing the jig of the dead. Too much moonlight ignites the bones, sets them on fire, and I am keenly aware that I have way too much moonlight in my eyes, in my prolonged sieges of staring. I must’ve swallowed god knows how many moons when I was younger. My entire interior flooded with defaced moons. I am blessings and curses through and through. I am deathly afraid of the sorceress lurking in my depths. Like with my mother’s bones, I keep a safe distance. Se changes are happening. My mother’s bones are telling me my history. Spelling it out slowly in glyphs and codes. The sorceress within is budding. She is preparing to emerge, dripping brine and chrysalis goo, a new witch for turning seasons.

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Shadow Work

Posted on November 3, 2022 by John Biscello

When the girl was young she would practice spells, she would recite things she made up, verses of nonsense and babble born from the foam that would slather the edges of her mouth when imagining words, all this done to cure her mother’s sadness, her morass and pall. Her mother’s shadow had a shadow, the girl could see it, the various shapes it assumed, how it would sometimes rise up from the ground as if on stilts, while other times it would shrink itself into a compacted ball, a quivering knot that raced across the earth like a dark warbling platelet, a watery disc. Her mother’s shadow’s shadow was a shapeshifter, tints of deceit clinging to its aura. None of the spells the girl came up with worked. No matter what she said, what she wrote, what she sang, what she chanted, what she cast forth, the universe and its many hosts and species remained indifferent to her sincerest efforts.

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Cherry

Posted on November 1, 2022 by John Biscello

Claudia made herself into Cherry and went to the strip club just because. Green eye shadow. Black eyeliner. Red lipstick. A face painted to imitate the likeness of another face, a wanting face, a grave tablature, a motherland face veiling new-old eyes, virginally ancient eyes.

Cherry entered the strip club. First thing she did was to go into the restroom. The floor was sticky. Paper towels crumpled and strewn about. The walls a corroded lime color, algae in a dreamless cave kind of greendark. Cherry inspected her face in the mirror. Green eye shadow black eyeliner red lipstick reflected back to her in bronze mortuary light. As if the world were ending inside the bathroom. Cherry tried on a smile. Her smile in the mirror snapped back at her, a boomerang with barracuda teeth. The strip club is going to be fun, Cherry heard the words in her head, repeating, it’s going to be fun, repeating, it’s going to be, a loop pleasing to the ear, how small your ears she noticed in the funereally tinted glass, your ears are much smaller than I remember, and they’re not pierced, maybe one day … it’s going to be fun, the words kept muscling in, with Cherry understanding this was how reality worked. Chant like vibrations assumed precedence. Things happened because they had to happen, they were insisted upon repeatedly and reality was established as something happening. Before exiting the restroom, Cherry flushed the toilet once, wanting to hear the legendary whoosh of a toilet in a stall, echoes of an old man’s cough ground up in a compactor.

The stage was a wooden plank, its perimeters adorned by frosted white bulbs, a runway spanning about twelve feet in length upon which a voluptuous woman with dark braided hair and monumental breasts was parading back and forth her feet squishily packed into glitter-sequined heels back and forth backed by disco western grooves blaring from house speakers.

Cherry thought about sitting. She continued to stand. She watched the men watching the woman on stage. Their eyes … the whole thing like glazed over gluetraps. Cherry wondered what they saw. She was certain they weren’t all seeing the same thing. That wasn’t possible. Cherry saw what she saw through Cherry’s eyes. And wondered. Why? What was it? How was it? Was there sincere passion aroused by this ritual, or was it rigged, a simulacrum of passion generating its own cause and effect through the agency of rote standards: if doing A. you will feel B. Whether or not you felt B. didn’t matter. It was a B. which belonged unequivocally to its preceding A., a marriage contrived in calculus. Cherry wished she could interview the eyes of the men staring, wished she could ask them questions, hear what they had to say, listen to each set of eyes speak off the record autonomously and honestly about what it was they were taking in, being taken in by, no judgment, she just wanted to know the eye’s impressions in relation to the brain’s shifting perceptions. And somewhere, of course, the desert of lust had a say in all this.

Cherry watched in silence the men staring at the woman. The song ended. Scattered applause. The woman waving, as if to soldiers leaving for war. Her smile was pure candy. The woman left the stage. Another woman came on, a gartered snake with a budding parasol. Cherry, mirrorless, forgot who she was, where she was, and considered taking home one of the men, whichever one would best fit in her purse.

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Mothlight

Posted on October 31, 2022 by John Biscello

It happens like that. Slow baked, sudden bubbling, no cauldron, face up in the vortex. You become days of mourning. A pall, a viscous grayish veil. You can no longer see clearly or purely. Vision pales, angel eyes gone. You are here upon this earth, lost, and that which has been interpreted and internalized as scarry pulp and Grand Guignol with no intermission has taken its toll. There is only so much you can take, so much the body, heart and mind can absorb, tours of hell end in hell you tell yourself, or hear it told, while toxins accumulate. How to detoxify? It seems life has become a cyclical purge, always purging, always shedding, and beneath it all the pall. You are days of mourning.

It is grieving. It is grief on all fours. Grief on all sixes. All eights. Bark bark at the moon. Why not? The moon won’t bark back. The moon is glacial, neutral, sovereign. The moon does not exist for you. It is not your goddess in waiting, not an apogee for refugees or orphanage for waylaid vagrants. Then again the moon becomes the firmament church ice and blue for those who are days of mourning, so who knows what secret mercies the moon may bestow upon the needy and grieving barking wildly in the dark.

Days of mourning become days of mourning because weeks of mourning months of mourning years of mourning. Moths flutter around the lighted graves of the living. Open your mouth wider, wider still, and if a moth flies out (or in), kneel upon the earth as if worlds depended on it.  

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Scratch

Posted on October 31, 2022 by John Biscello

Once upon a time before people were monsters. When people didn’t eat each other. Out here we’ve got to be careful. I defected. I became fugitive singular. I defected from plural, from we. I defected so as to claim I again, I for the first time, so as to become a roving sovereign speck, someone who will take to the open road, there were so many tales of the great open road, the open road a glowing nexus and magnet for the unimaginable, I wanted to go there, wanted to singularize as chance and exile so as to see, so as to experience. Once upon a time before people became monsters who ate people. Times were different, I think, so I’ve heard, I don’t know. Roving, sovereign, I will give myself a new name, a new definition befitting the open road, I will call myself Calamity Jane, and in my distances there will be clangy boxcars, kerosene lamps, brown sludge coffee from rusted tins, and I’ll need a hat, a good hat, a proper hat, the right hat for a roving sovereign self who calls herself Calamity Jane. What about stage coaches? Wild horses? Pulp serials and penny dreadfuls? Everywhere is dust, vaudeville reruns of previous apocalypses, dust-skinned bones, so I guess I can summon and plagiarize whenever wherever however, the rimless bowls of dust being a broad open canvas upon which I can conjure from scratch.

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