Desire

Posted on November 18, 2020 by John Biscello

Within

the rounded sermon

of the inanimate,

a favored coursing,

by which light

spreads its wordless

fingers

upon

the world’s private longing.

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Could Be Heaven

Posted on November 18, 2020 by John Biscello

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.

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The Lighthouse and the Labyrinth

Posted on November 18, 2020 by John Biscello

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.

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Heart Country

Posted on November 18, 2020 by John Biscello

“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.

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A Thousand Women

Posted on November 16, 2020 by John Biscello

“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.

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Toy Story

Posted on November 16, 2020 by John Biscello

“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.

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American Alley

Posted on November 16, 2020 by John Biscello

“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.

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Them Blues

Posted on November 16, 2020 by John Biscello

“… the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged train and transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”– B.F. McKeever, “Cane as Blues”

Your fingers

know, by heart,

the relief route–

Allow them

the knead

and saving grace

of a fluid trespass

upon your most aching parts,

as you whistle

your way past the graveyard

under the stars

your blues

running on

to catch the dark

dreaming.

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Walkabout

Posted on November 13, 2020 by John Biscello

“My whole life has been little else than a long reverie divided into chapters by my daily walks”–Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To ground,

daily,

these dreams

of novel origins,

bracing bold contact

with rounded edges,

off which falling

is favored

and soundly encouraged.

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Tall Black Armchair, or, Anais Nin Revisited

Posted on November 13, 2020 by John Biscello

“The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair.  I will be the one woman you will never have … excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.” – Anais Nin to Henry Miller

It was a gag,

or maybe not.

Maybe a seance of sorts,

a call to the past, or . . .

whatever it was, it demanded action.

I bought a tall black armchair

at a thrift store, one of its legs

slightly shorter than the rest,

which somehow felt right.

I placed the armchair in the attic

and draped a white sheet over it.

Drew big dark eyes on the sheet

in permanent marker,

and then a Rorschach blot of a mouth.

I laid a pair of my ex-girlfriend’s

black lace stockings on top

of the sheet, almost as an erotic offering

to flesh things out.

My ghost of Anais Nin

now needed sound

and so I

made a mixed tape of clips

of her voice

then placed a cassette player

with the tape inside

under the sheet

and turned out all the lights

in the attic

as I lit one thin long candle

which gave off a warm auerate glow

and then communed with the ghost of Anais Nin

for however long eternity lasts

in the world of one

who sails

according to Imagination’s standards

alone.

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