None So Distant (Story, All Fours, Lore and Order)
by John Biscello
Story
In the beginning the dreaming not the word. The word came later. It came whenever and betrayed silence and this was the beginning of fiction. Now you’ve got what passes for a world of dreaming of fiction and parallels splintered into multiples merging. Metaphors moved worlds. People grew from wilds. From the bones of sound. Someone heard someone else talking and that someone and someone else were born through listening and talking. When this happened no one knows. To say it happened a long time ago or that it has yet to happen amount to one and the same thing. The bones of sound rest on symmetry. Time is required to keep a beat a rhythm yet music itself resounds timelessly. Symmetry is proof of the dreaming. Within the dreaming there are many stories beginnings parallels multiples and everything everywhere dreaming going on dreaming going on dreaming going on. The bones of sound endless. Symmetry indivisible. Let me tell you a story someone once said and in telling this story they were also saying Let me tell you a story about me telling you a story. In the telling is the me and the me and you. In the telling parallels merge then split and merge again endlessly. Stories cannot die. They are the impossible.
All Fours
We are out here on all fours panting in the sun the bleary merciless maraschino sun burning us. It has been a long while one of those spells that feels foreverish out here in these fields unseen dreaming of god knows what. We are permanently scarred. Some of us suggested we become a group that goes by the name Permanently Scarred maybe a band except none of us sing or play an instrument. I’d say we are disembodied voices except we are on all fours with the sun burning us so something like bodies like skin must be our lot and inheritance. Knowing the void answerless you’d think we’d stop asking questions but we don’t What’s for dinner Where’s the moon Did we do something to deserve this. We ask answerless and listen hoping dreamless. You could call us a sorry bunch but then again not knowing whether finite or infinite there is nothing to assess no one to blame. There’s just on all fours the sun burning unrelenting. If we decide to call ourselves Permanently Scarred maybe one of us will learn to sing so we can earn our name. It’s either that or absolute silence which none of us have yet tried.
Lore and Order
We recall fondly. We recollect. The good old days in which we titled windmills redolently and rode clanging dusty boxcars across the glaring horizontal spread of america. What a lay we said hitching up our pants sticking our peckers into every gopher hole and indian eardrum we could wrestle or manage. The good old days an unrolling panoramic canvas of america painted over with screaming reds graying blues mudpacked browns other colors running together like luxuries found lost. We posed as stiff hipped sheriffs marshaling laws to frontiers unexplored my god we were real artists then painting with the light just right to conceal any shadows creeping unwanted across borders. From beyond history I sit here now in this abandoned boxcar a tramp with torn baggy trousers too tight calico vest dustcaked bowler writing songs no one will ever sing or listen to but that’s fine just fine. A train trackless running outside of time is concerned solely with mythology. Mythology in this case being the preset moment expended upon infinitely within the mantling of lore.
Originally from Brooklyn, NY, writer, poet, performer, and playwright, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of four novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, and No Man's Brooklyn; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag; two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. His produced, full-length plays include: LOBSTERS ON ICE, ADAGIO FOR STRAYS, THE BEST MEDICINE, ZEITGEIST, U.S.A., and WEREWOLVES DON’T WALTZ.
Posted on April 23rd 2023