Here, then,
is the poet’s most holy
and vocational duty–
to clarify, beyond the rabble
and ill communication,
something flowingly equivalent
to the reflection of the moon
on dark rippling waters,
sated, briefly,
in savvy communion
with what lies beneath.
“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”–Voltaire
Philosophy,
like the proverbial weasel,
goes POP,
as God, sporting a Groucho Marx get-up
(you know, the glasses, the eyebrows, the cigar)
delivers gags and zingers,
turning the entire world
into a vaudeville circuit
as the audience files out
the in door.
At the break of day,
wandering softly within–
you, from a distance.
“We are strangers and exiles here. I feel it now more certainly than ever—and the only home a man ever has on earth, the only moment when he escapes from the prisms of loneliness, is when he enters into the heart of another person. In all the enormous darkness of living and dying, I see these brave little lights go up—the only hope and reason for it all … I believe in love, and in its power to redeem and save our lives.”—Thomas Wolfe
Redemption,
through every course,
is a loving wake
to ports unrivaled.
“Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.”—Anais Nin
Leave the impossible
to the fishes
and the stars,
to packed suitcases
tagged for Borneo or Mars.
Or, become like Alice,
and commit six random acts
of impossibility
before you’ve had your breakfast,
which still leaves plenty of time
to do regular things like shopping
or the dishes,
though you can bet
that your noon lunch date
with The Fool
at the edge of that seaside cliff
will be looming large
and may endanger
your routine of normalcy
for the rest of the day
or for years to come.
“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
How many,
committed to their record of days
upon the earth,
crusade with a pen
and floating paper lanterns
pooling soft warm light
into the history of hidden valentines
pressed between the vellum pages
of a life
lived after the facts,
and before fiction’s altar,
a course on hunger
and its commensurate desires.
In that place
of memory and moonlight
where dreams pool
into soft beautiful wrecks,
I found her,
casually adrift
in a limbo of her own legislation,
and at the slightest touch,
under she went,
the moonlight left trembling
in remembrance
of her skin.
“Therefore, speak, speak at any price, say no matter what, since all words have equal value and all say the same thing, all repeat tirelessly the same call for help.” — Samuel Beckett
If we are to take Mister Beckett at his word, then ours is the language of smoke signals and morse code, ciphers of broken glass from which we architect sentences, personas, cities, worldviews that are both fragile and elaborate.
And what of silence, then? Sometimes golden, sometimes malignant–silence is the fox in the garden, the hours that slip away unnoticed. Silence is the music of the stars.
Listen. And speak when moved to speak–whatever words, whatever sounds–because this unrelenting call for help, when enlarged beyond the confines of self, are also the flagrant embers of a cosmic torch song, or the notes in the score of a film with music unending.
“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”– from The Torah
Paradox is the umbrella blown inside out in stormy weather, as we keep walking, still covered, yet determined to return the umbrella to its original form.
I close my eyes
and I see her
again,
a silhouette, near
to distance,
and dissolving–
the autumn rain
taps its seminal code
for longing
onto the trembling glass
of a window closed.
John Biscello 