Poem-1.
HOTEL ACAPULCO
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My emaciated hands continued to write,Â
turning each voice of death into paper,Â
That he lefts no will,Â
forgetting to look afterÂ
what everyone defines as the normal businessÂ
of every human being: office, home, family,Â
the ideal, at last, of a regular life.
Â
Abandoned, back in 2026, any defense
of a permanent contract,
labelled as unbalanced,Â
i’m locked up in the centre of Milan,
Hotel Acapulco, a decrepit hotel,Â
calling upon the dreams of the marginalized,Â
exhausting a lifetime’s savingsÂ
in magazines and meagre meals.
Â
When the Carabinieri burstÂ
into the decrepit room of the Hotel AcapulcoÂ
and find yet another dead man without a will,Â
who will tell the ordinary storyÂ
of an old man who lived windbreak?
2.
THE BALLAD OF PEGGY AND PEDRO
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The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestialsÂ
of the Garibaldi Bridge, with a mixture of hatred and despair,Â
teaches us the intimate relationship between geometry and love,Â
to love as if we were maths surrounded by stray dogs.
Â
Peggy you were drunk, normal mood,Â
in the slums along the bed of the TiberÂ
and alcohol, on August evenings, doesn’t warm you up,Â
clouding every sense in annihilating dreams,Â
transforming every chewed-up sentence into a gunfight in the backÂ
on armour dissolved by the summer heat.
Lying on the edges of the bridge’s ledges,Â
among the drop-outs of the Rome open city,
you opened your heart to the gratuitous insult of Pedro,Â
your lover, and toppled over, falling into the void,Â
drawing gravitational trajectories from the sky to the cement.
Â
Pedro wasn’t drunk, a day’s journey away,Â
you weren’t drunk, abnormal state of mind,Â
in the slums along the bed of the Tiber,Â
or in the empty parties of Milan’s movida,Â
with the intention of explaining to dogs and trampsÂ
a curious lesson of non-Euclidean geometry.
Mounted on the edge of the bridge,Â
in the apathetic indifference of your distracted pupils,Â
you jumped, in the same trajectory of love,Â
along the same fatal path as your Peggy,
landing on the cement at the same instant.
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The punkbestials of the Garibaldi Bridge, cleared by the local authority,
will spread a surreal lesson to every slum in the worldÂ
centred on the astonishing ideaÂ
that love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.
3.
THE ANTI-PROMISE TO LOVE
Anti-poet, victim of my anti-poetry, Â
all I could do is dedicate to you an antpromise of love,
my anti-promise of love would have the features of a synesthesia,Â
the Stalinist hardness of steel and the softness of colour,Â
the finesse of friendship and the consistency of love,Â
your white eyes turn me into a hydrophobic cynic,Â
and there’s no doctor for rage, my love.
Â
An anti-promise of love to be read before a registrar,Â
as to convince a tecno-trivial world,Â
i’ve loved you since June 1976, perhaps, in truth, since April,Â
i was an embryo and you were still immersed in the aurora borealis,Â
for six years you would have been an angel, a ghost, the inessential of a fractal,Â
without batting an eyelid waiting for you, six years, thirty-six years, with nothing to say,Â
the sheep of Panurge’s contemporaries would condemn me to total silence.
Â
You are my anti-promise of love, and the idea may seem imperceptible to you,
i observe you sleeping, serene, like a crumb abandoned in a toaster,Â
my love I am stripped of the role of âsapperâ – it is abyssal like a submarine,Â
condemned to scatter torpedoes under the (false) guise of a dogfish.Â
4.
BALLAD OF THE NON-EXISTENT
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I could try to tell youÂ
with the sound of my keyboardÂ
how Baasima died of leprosyÂ
without ever reaching the border,Â
or how the Armenian MeroujanÂ
under a flutter of half-moons
felt the air in his eyes vanishÂ
thrown into a mass grave;
Charlee, who moved to BrisbaneÂ
in search of a better world,Â
ends the journeyÂ
in the mouth of an alligator,Â
or Aurelio, named BrunaÂ
who, after eight months in hospitalÂ
died of AIDS contractedÂ
to hit a ring road.
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Nobody will remember Yehoudith,Â
her lips carmine red,Â
erased by drinking toxic poisonsÂ
in an extermination camp,Â
or Eerikki, with his red beard, Â
defeated by the turbulence of the waves,Â
who sleeps, scoured by orcas,
on the bottom of some sea;
the head of Sandrine, DuchessÂ
of Burgundy heard the rumour of the feastÂ
as it fell from the blade of a guillotineÂ
into a basketÂ
and Daisuke, modern samurai,Â
counted the revolutions of a plane’s engine Â
transhumanizing a kamikaze gesture into harakiri.
Â
I could go on and onÂ
in the stifling heat of a summer night
how Iris and Anthia, deformed Spartan childrenÂ
were abandoned,Â
or how Deendayal died of deprivationÂ
attributable to the single crimeÂ
of living the life of an outcastÂ
without ever having rebelled;
Ituha, an Indian girl,Â
threatened with a knife,Â
who ends up dancing with ManitouÂ
in the anteroom of a brothelÂ
and Luther, born in LancashireÂ
freed from the profession of beggarÂ
and forced to die by His Britannic MajestyÂ
in the coal mines.
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Who will remember ItzayanaÂ
and her family massacredÂ
in a village on the outskirts of MexicoÂ
by Carranza’s retreating army,Â
and what of Idris, the African rebel,
stunned by shocks and burns
while untamed by colonial domination,Â
he tried to steal an ammunition truck;
Shahdi flew high into the skyÂ
above the flagpoles of the Green Revolution,Â
landing in Tehran with his wings torn apartÂ
by a cannon shot,
and Tikhomir, a Chechen bricklayer,Â
that fell among the indifferent faces
to the ground from the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum,
without comment.
Â
From objects of narrativeÂ
fractured into fragments of non-existenceÂ
transmits distant soundsÂ
of resistance.