“After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice, than it is to be born once.” – Voltaire
On
the slow
winding
backroads
to heaven,
the soul–
burnished, braided in ash,
given to fits of symmetry,
plunged into plagues,
stuck with knives
in a circus fiasco,
hitching freights–
just keeps on going and going,
cycling through a gateless opera of lives,
herald to its own bask
and choir,
birth and death
but arbitrary checkpoints
in its endless assumption
of wonder.
“Gnossienne: A moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you because ultimately neither of you has a map or a master key or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.”–from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
There,
in the unfinished attic,
where books
have gone unread
for god knows how long
and collected the skin of dust,
you wish to discover
the story that will serve as the key,
or perhaps procure a time-bitten
map from beneath a loose floorboard,
something
that will grant you the means
to travel from the attic to the basement
and back
without moving an inch–
You,
unsure as to whom
the attic belongs
(is it hers? is it yours?)
prepare to court
the pregnant dark
in what may amount
to a confession
or tryst
that no one
will ever hear about
not
in the light of day.
I am happy to announce that the hardcover edition of my new poetry book, Moonglow on Mercy Street, will be published in early December (CSF Publishing).
Anyone potentially interested in reviewing the book for their blog, or other site/forum, please contact me and I’d be happy to provide a digital PDF of the manuscript. Cheers and blessings!
MOONGLOW ON MERCY STREET
These fifty poems, most of them written in 2020, comprise a kaleidoscopic palette of tones, moods and styles, in crafting living mythology from the world at large and within. Metamorphic bop, scat-alchemy, bare bones blues and gospel, love songs and odes, pagan pop, and cinematic remixes, make of Moonglow on Mercy Street a free-range concert aimed at the imagination and the senses. And, as a lyrical pilgrimage fueled by hope and wonder, it stands as a shining testament to Henry Miller’s claim that “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
Within
the rounded sermon
of the inanimate,
a favored coursing,
by which light
spreads its wordless
fingers
upon
the world’s private longing.
No sin
of which to speak,
always beginnings,
rogue, feral,
growing wild
among the greenest seasons
of fire
and becoming,
or, siring the form
of a dancer
dancing in the clouds,
lightning at her feet,
as the rain begins to fall,
soundless,
into the heaven
of your choice.
A thousand
and one labyrinths,
maybe more,
filled with the lost
and forlorn, weeping,
yet never losing sight
of the hidden lighthouse,
that favored legend
of which rumors have prevailed,
to guide the dreamers,
in the way that secrets
whisper into the dark
their most seasoned longing.
“Imagination certainly is an entertaining thing to have—and it is great to be a fool.” – Georgia O’ Keefe
She,
in painting
the bones
and the blue
while distilling,
in tenderest strokes,
the interior lives
and longing of flowers,
applied
fool-proof measures
and grace
to the lore of Imagination,
unquestionably entertained
by its own heart
for heart’s sake.
“I am not indifferent to the greater dramas hanging over us, but drama is everywhere the same, microcosm or macrocosm. It is not my destiny to live the drama of Spain, war, death, agony, hunger. It is my destiny to live the drama of feeling and imagination, reality and unreality, the drama underlying the others, a drama without guns, dynamite, explosions. But it is the same one, it is from this one that the other is born: conflict, cruelty, revenge, jealousy, envy. In me it all happens in another world, in myself, and myself as an artist who remembers each day more what each day of my life touches in the past. I do not live beyond war, the drama that hastens death, accelerates the end. I live the personal drama responsible for the larger one, seeking a cure. Perhaps it is a greater agony to live this life in which my awareness makes a thousand revolutions while others make only one. My span may seem smaller but it is really larger because it covers all the obscure routes of the soul and body seeking truth, seeking the antiserum against hate and war, never receiving medals for its courage. It is my thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women. It would be simpler, shorter, swifter not to seek this deepening perspective to my life and lose myself in the simple world of war, hunger, death.”— Anais Nin, Spring, 1966
A thousand women
lived
and breathed
in the billowing span
of a single heart’s
revolution
to seed itself
in the dark fertile memory
of an earth
limitless
by terms.
“Tedium . . . it’s perhaps, after all, the dissatisfaction of the intimate soul because we haven’t given it a belief, the desolation of the sad child we are deep down, because we haven’t bought him a divine toy.” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
All those sad children,
orphaned to tomorrow,
and thrifting cloth
from shadow
to conceal
their wanting in existential drag–
yet,
no cover-up
can soundproof
the heart’s barest cry
for that legendary toy,
ordered by the divine,
and damned near
impossible to claim.
“What absurdity. There is not one novel of America. There are a thousand Americas. Big Business is only one of its inhuman, monstrous products. But jazz is the expression of America’s romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force. Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything. Why not pay attention to the artists who humanize, keep the source of feeling alive, keep hope alive?” – Anais Nin, Winter, 1956
On the street corner
where Main meets
wherever,
a thin man in a beret,
holding a briefcase,
standing in front of a mounted
American flag,
barking through a megaphone–
Souls
bought and sold
souls bought and sold
here—
while three blocks down,
in a nameless alley,
the sound
and fury
of a squealing sax,
eliciting lore
from a calling
measureless in its purge.
John Biscello 