As Fate Would Have It

Posted on August 11, 2022 by John Biscello

“Fate will have it—and this has always been the case with me—that all the ‘outer’ aspects of my life should be accidental. Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value.” — Carl Jung

He knew from an early age,

or perhaps it would be truer

to say from a timeless state,

that it was meant to be

an inside job.

The outer was simply a pageant

and circus of externals

run by ghosts

and blind assassins.

His quest,

as foretold by his soul,

was to learn to navigate

through the interior world,

the plains and ravines and hinterlands of psyche,

its deep dark forests too,

and to do so abiding faith

and trust in illuminated breadcrumbs,

scattered

here and there

to the alchemy

of paths always forming.

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Sideshow

Posted on August 10, 2022 by John Biscello

The Great Snakewalker, holding a yellow umbrella with splashy red polka dots that conjures the notion of enormous blood platelets, balancing on a tightrope comprised of tail-tied snakes with flicking tongues, descendants of Ouroboros, and she the Great Snakewalker does this nightly, in an airless tent…

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Strange Angels

Posted on August 10, 2022 by John Biscello

The days fly into the blue and disappear, and your mind, in its memory-making, contains the disappeared days as film archive. I want to set fire to the archive. Burn all the films. Watch the celluloid twist and incinerate. I want to escape the past that does not exist. I want to escape the past that is inescapable because there is no past, the very idea of the past is what keeps you from escaping, hence the inescapability.

She bangs on tender hollows, taps on the vibrating flesh, the trembling corpuscles. Taps and knocks and a rhythm amasses in and out of thin air. Thin blue air. She specializes in thin blue air, as all high priestesses do.

She saw her many. In pieces. Each vying for autonomy, each aspiring toward unification. Her eyes beheld broken spires, roads logjammed with broken spires, the look of what-happened-here. A slideshow of awe and terror. To witness violence and wonder is to see the birds falling from the sky, hailing upon the earth dead on arrival. Their wings like torn paper prayers, like questions unanswered. Their mysterious deaths lead us to the strange wingless angels, the blue ones.

We have become bereft of true language.

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Metronome

Posted on August 10, 2022 by John Biscello

It doesn’t take much to become days of mourning. This world provides plenty of opportunities to convert one into days of mourning. Then days of mourning becomes weeks of mourning. Months of mourning. Years. But it begins with days of mourning. And at heart, remains days of mourning that extends into weeks, months, years.

Days. Numbered. Repeated. Metronomic. Needle and prick, prick and needle. Sleeping Beauty has become a lab rat for disease control. Anima being the worst disease of all according to the membered members of the Ding Dong Society. You had to laugh. And she did. Same as she cried. What else was there? Laughter, tears. Rivers were born of such elements. I wasn’t always this old. Or this young. When I was a child, through the bars of my crib I saw tiny men marching toward my crib, every night. They were going to get me. They never reached me. That almost is the worst. Think about it. Put yourself in my mind’s shoes. They’re going to get you. They’ll never reach you.  

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In the Catacombs of Grief

Posted on August 10, 2022 by John Biscello

In the catacombs of grief, she wandered. She wandered, without thirst, without hunger. This frightened her. Had she lost her basic humanity? Why had she created such elaborate labyrinths? Say that ten times fast, she said to herself. At least her sense of humor was intact. She had had a need for labyrinths, and for wandering in them without regard for time, since she was a child. And since she didn’t want to get lost in someone else’s labyrinth … If I get lost in any labyrinth, I want it to be one of my own making. She had gotten good at it: the labyrinth-making. Yet, down here, in the catacombs of grief, which she thinks is below the labyrinth—but could she be sure? Maybe the catacombs were flanking the labyrinth (which would make them irregular catacombs, but still…when it came to her…), maybe they are outside the labyrinth entirely. Orientation in the labyrinth was damn near impossible. She possessed an inner compass. That registered sense of direction through mood and feeling. Sort of like knowing where you are based on the temperature you’re experiencing. Here, the catacombs of grief, where it is cold. No wind. Just pure cold, like being in a deep freezer. There was also the wailing. Who or what produced the wailing, she had no idea. But it made her heart weep. She cried and cried within, and it was in there, the within that is within, where she saw and then became the woman using words, voiced, written, stitched together to form a life raft, upon which she cascaded along the River Grief which had been produced by the woman weeping her secret heartbreak—the tall woman crying secret tears for the wailing whatevers—the small woman riding the raft on the turbulent River Grief—and how they were both her, being watched over by the other woman who may not even be a woman, a mysterious genderless figure, an enigma destined to witness, take notes. The whole thing, at times, was completely overwhelming. Could she crack? Would she crack? She thought of Humpty Dumpty, that poor existential sap. He fell, cracked, and couldn’t be mended. The lesson there: not all get mended. Humpty became so much yesterday so quickly. And God, with his Hoover vac, sucked up the shattered remnants of Humpty and that was that. Poor Humpty. In the distance … there was distance. That got her down. To look out into the distance and see only distance … there’s only so much that a heart can take.

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Aria

Posted on August 9, 2022 by John Biscello

You are at a masquerade ball that takes place at Club Infinity, and you notice a lonely woman standing in the corner, her entire body breathes loneliness like strange music thickening the air, which in essence thickens the plot … a perfumed aria, a pungent aura of loneliness … and the woman remaining perfectly still, too perfectly, infinity becomes her, and after awhile it is hard to tell if she is A) a lonely woman standing in a corner, B) loneliness itself being manifested as a mummified woman standing in a corner, C) a corner come to life and promising the loneliness of a woman you can never have, that is un-haveable.

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Moonstruck

Posted on August 9, 2022 by John Biscello

From scratch, we dig out

what we think the moon owes us–

Lore of attraction.

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The Gift

Posted on August 9, 2022 by John Biscello

Within

the scarry stories of the heart

lived a little girl

with no actual name

who gave stars as playthings

to all her imaginary friends.

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Window for Two

Posted on August 9, 2022 by John Biscello

Do you plan to get up today Max?

No Marge, you?

I am up.

You plan on staying up?

No, just wanted a spot of tea.

That’s very British of you.

What is?

A spot of tea . . . a spot.

I heard it on a TV program the other night.

Which one?

It was . . . something on B.B.C.

No I meant . . . which night.

Oh, umm . . . I can’t recall.

Very well.

Would you like a spot of tea?  I think it was Tuesday.  Or Wednesday. 

Yes those two are easy to confuse.  Yes I’ll have a spot.

(Marge leaves the room and comes back carrying two cups of tea.)

Thank you Marge.

 I hope you like cream.  I put cream in it Max. 

Yes Marge I love cream, you know I love cream. 

Oh yes.  It’s like Tuesday or Wednesday . . . sometimes it’s hard to tell.  Well? 

There was a raven perched on that skinny branch.  That really really skinny one. 

Point to it.

(Max points to the really really skinny branch.)

I don’t see a raven. 

No, he’s gone . . . he was there, was.  That’s the branch.

Oh I see.

It was lovely, his sleek blackness, his cool opaqueness, against that branch so skinny and sort of long. 

 (Sigh!)  That’s why I hate to get up.  Even for a spot of tea.

(Max and Marge laugh.)

So was it really lovely Max? 

It was . . . quite lovely.  But don’t worry Marge, I don’t want you to start worrying now.      

I won’t Max.

You promise?

I promise.  How’s your tea?

Quite lovely.

Like the raven? 

Different sort of lovely.   

Oh I know, just . . . you used that same phrase. 

Which one? 

Quite lovely.  You used it for the raven and for the tea. 

You’re a remarkable woman Marge. 

Thank you Max.

 (Marge and Max kiss. Slobbery, smacking. Unlock lips. Stare for a long while in silence.)

Did you see that leaf fall? 

Ummm. 

It fell and there it is, the fetal one.

You sure that’s it?

I followed it all the way down.

Extraordinary.  And fetal yes, that’s just the right word. 

For? 

What it is. 

Ummm.

(Marge sips her tea.)

Max? 

Yes? 

If I need to go out to the bathroom….

Yes? 

In a few minutes—which I’m certain I will . . . is it okay….

Yes, darling? 

If my tea is finished, is it okay . . . can I pee into the teacup? 

My darling, we’ve been married 44 years, of course, if you’d like. 

It’s just . . . I don’t want to get up again . . . maybe miss a raven or something else . . . quite lovely. 

No need to get up Marge, you’ve got a teacup to pee in. 

Yes, I do, don’t I?  You’re a wonderful husband Max. 

You’re an extraordinary wife Marge.

(Marge sips her tea. Max sips his tea.

They look at each other then out the window, unfinished.)

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To a Young Writer Whom I Have Yet to Meet or May Never Know

Posted on August 9, 2022 by John Biscello
  • Finding and following your own voice is vitally important.  Yet that idea can be extended to: finding and following your own voices.  They are inside you.  Many of them.  Who knows why they are there, and from where they came.  But they are waiting to be found.  And released into the air and light, into the world.
  • Play is Serious Business (see: Children).
  • Commitment as a discipline, not the fickleness of flings. Passion waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows, but discipline is as steady and consistent as you make it.
  • Attune to your internal rhythms and abide by your creative impulses.  Discover what it is you want to say, not what others want to hear.
  • Writing is not the end of the world, nor the beginning of it.  Even when it feels that way.
  • For the 99 people out there who do not enjoy or appreciate or give a shit about what you’re doing, remember the 100th person who is not only waiting to hear from you, but needing to.
  • Daydream actively.
  • If what you’re writing does not produce that warm, curious feeling in you, that zing and resonance, it might be a good time to ask yourself: Why the hell am I doing this?
  • Writing is a communicable disease.  Transmit your contagions with unrepentant glee and abandon. You may infect someone who will happily never be the same again.  
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