With tenderest regards to everything,
to everything,
we are a hymnal species of kissing cousins,
from amoeba to Moses
to the stunning narwhal,
our sea tongues have touched upon
the lush symmetry and limitless vibrato
of a daringly molecular burlesque.
The world has become an enormous mouth.
Or a senile teenager fumbling with a fire sale chemistry set.
Silence, and solitude,
arouse their favored ebb
within the subtle gloam of twilight.
Twilight is a meek and intrepid lover,
an inscrutable pair of slippers
softening your steps as you cross
from one passage to the next, to the next,
where lost hours seed and seduce your invictus
into an exponentially stunning fade.
Twilight is seductively meek.
Every day, at day’s end,
it inherits the earth
through valentine quivers
and softcore volitions of symmetry—
the sky, at its supple mercy,
bruises so easily,
pale liminal purple
adoring the tenderest wounds
between lovers merging nightly.
Tablatures of light
engraved in your palms
by eyeless angels
once upon a time
when yes was yes
and waves were forms
serve as source citation
while hosting vividly the fact
that your hands are the temples
which can be entered any time you’d like
no eye tests
or slow burn required.
It is a call, a calling.
Lost voices committing mutiny
to service seasons unknown—
Strange wingless angels
of mercy and memory,
the blue ones,
sounding the call, a calling.
Melody hosts its own discipline,
and we, the fragile disciples of music
and night blooming,
engrave this on the settlements of our bones.
Our bones, our bones seized and trembling,
as if gospel raised from zombies
among the centuries of metaphors roundly sown.
She wasn’t sure how she had become days of mourning.
It began with a pall, a thick viscous scrim
that changed what she saw, sawed herself into
halves and quarters and post-dissection she noticed
days had turned into weeks into months into years
into moths (what was this closet? where had she gone?)
and altogether a knotted bundle
that could not be spent, or misspent,
there was no economy to the quivering mass
of darkening days past, days she had become.
Knowing that escape was both impossible and inevitable,
she returned to the staggered fiction
of nights with no memory,
nights in which days of mourning
factored in little to none
to all.
Advertisements for astronauts
in fish-net stockings,
and you, tobacco-stained fingertips,
a scholar of whistling,
salacious in the way
you used to spit brown juice
into the wind, expecting to not get hit—
those were the days,
I sighed to my red suitcase
with the stubborn zipper,
as I packed away my bones
and thought about which cinema,
in which universe,
I should go and visit
before the postcard in my pocket
dried gravely at the edges
and lost all sense of meaning.
We are the stunning brides of tomorrow,
dressing up for ritual matrimony
in an airless church
where children laugh
and hurl gulls of rice,
and the candles, matching light to symmetry,
never go out.
John Biscello 