Inside Mother

Your mother is under the cuts of surgeons
operating in the middle of Piazza Pitagora, Crotone.
There are no traffic lights,
it just depends what car people are driving –
Priority is based on eye contact and rust…
I hope they stop to see your mother lying there,
and not just her adhesions.

Your voice was sad this morning, the shop apparently empty.
A cool place in a white via of Lipari.
Again, over the sea, tribunals…caring madly,
wounds are demarcated…healed…and now in the traffic 
They will open her…
I hope they know she’s your mother lying there
and see not just the adhesions.

…last week you sent me caper flower, drew pictures of 
abandoned property in bursts of words -
spoke of taking Giulia there,
of Sundays sitting together in ruins…
I sit alone in my bunker in Milano
but can still see volcano sleeping.

Now it is a salicious taste of yellow, vile flower filled pastures
and precipitating cliffs,
a dermic Aeolian she sail on…and you
asked your sister something quietly,
as your mum lies in Piazza Pitagora alone
the surgeons take coffee.

This traffic will sort itself out…it will won’t it?
And I hope they will ship back our mothers to us, 
in one piece, when this morning is over.


Over Brancaleone

I know you are somewhere
And I am still scrolling
Along the empty autumn beach
north of Brancaleone.
No sounds come from the fields,
or from the contradas.
The cicadas are 
electrical hums,
over desolate countryside,
in hybrid mode, flying over
my mother’s body.
Distant from me.
Someone has placed arrows
on the parched land
to assit this search, but,
I am wandering as usual.

Illegal housing are just a white 
glitch on this irresolute landscape,
the road is too straight,
the trees too arranged 
and I am reminded in close up of what 
I cannot tolerate about you.

You have no hold on me now mother, 
your gaze will not bother me,
no judgement will dictate my actions.
no faces on balconies peering down,
no reason to speak in hushed voices,
or offer niceties to the uncouth.
I am free and press the minus button,
and retreat from this intimacy
and hover over your marinas.

Africo, spaventose fiumare
I drag myself over acres
of eroded vineyards,
I am embarrassed how pock marked you are.  
My eyes with this partial 
macro lens had never seen you this way.
So little of you has been left untouched.
They claimed you as their own,
used you for their own satisfaction,
now you support man alone,
demanding incessant fruits,
don’t you see, he has drained
you of your natural vitality.

Aldo Moro, Fratelli Bandieri, Schiavo
and Ardore grafted in you,
Malara, Mammola, and Pezzolo too.
The desire is to clamber further
and keep searching, restlessly
anticipating some benedetta apparition
to save us from the beasts that 
crawl and have devour this precious land.


Taming the Ipsedixit

Emotions sit idly in our kitchen
watching the Ipsedixit 
strut about again
He has clipped wings…
Yep, I know it ‘s unfortunate…
It shouldn’t have happened to him.
But Love’s apron pockets are empty
Unpicked at the seams,
She sits ex silenzio
Bound in raffia keeping quite still
To keep her straw from spilling out.

Duty is carefully filing her nails not catching the bits,
while dogma sniffs and licks around the mucky chair legs.

Then quite from nowhere a quail taps on the window, 
Ipsedixit glares at this flightless bird,
Frustrated by his own struttance,
But fuiled by their uncanny semblance,
he squarks ab hominessly
an undomesticated acknowledgement
turns violently and fluttstutters away.
Lying
I lie in quietness now.
You lie too.

That person I thought I know has proven how much 
Commitment will force someone to invent that very same 
Commitment, and find excuses and portrayals that hid that 
One may feel so tired it might be preferable to forget every-
Thing beyond the very here and now.

I lie in quietness.
Your uneasy breathing,
autumn wind in birch trees
I wait for you to wake.

I wait for you to need me again
to tug at my breast and take from all
that is needed to help you grow.

I lie quietly and listen to you.
I want to need you an understand now
That I don’t havet to lie quietly
Hoping she will stir.

He will never know.
Silence can hide all,
the atmosphere is noisy.
In the background noise
my phrases become staccato,
no reason for andante,
I am not going anywhere now.
Thoughts can be allegro,
I can lie in them if need be,
Anywhere.  
Mute in perfect maternity.
Mon Fordon

He called farewell ahead, looked forward
made a sign backwards, shoulders not round,
not angular, held for years not days in one pose,
this head room you give allows us to 
wear silver buttoned waist coats,
keep hips free…slipping things below the waist,
I remember Thor Hill, Old Field and hunger.

My legs kick and make room,
In a bed that has only space for certain legs,
His ankles black, oily I still love them,
And stinking pasts are just passengers not 
residents.

I kiss your trunk, each desirable object,
Each return journey, and know there is no reserve,
We’ve never exhausted how reserve feels,
Still feeling able to walk, like gentry,
Breathing regular, distant, from toxic emissions.

How many cubic and litric displacements would 
Our deaths cause, you hanging off my hip,
Saddled to rotations per minute,
a horsepower that could not be measured
by any word or other.

Torqued…but as women we do not move,
We do not stand up, clothed in our skins as
If they are most beautiful shawl, compressed,
Legs apart, boots that compress with
Such a ratio your desire each bore and 
Stroke shrills out like a fire on Thorn hill,
And barbed knots of daisies bear slowly down.

His pulse, his valves, ventricular liftings,
All good as gold, working perfectly,
direct, acting, rolling, irrefutably mechanical,
and I dream of delivery, recommendations,
sequencial, injecting only you control.

Exhausted your turn and kiss my face,
Softly, the unfamiliar texture.
You pull over.
Now exhausted, I dab at my cheeks,
wet with tears, single and alone.

Cygnus Olor
…with night passing nearby and having moved I find your breathing standing by the side of a road I don’t know with swan feathers sewn into your second skin and then when you turn it’s not night and your rolling alone empty annoyed rolling and second to none you feel a second and recoil in sleep what now is a diving breath taken assenting deeper amongst the perfect night and I recoil myself half  asleep I sweep my half of me on you and for a moment feel a slight great vitality and retreat into what might be better ways and each time cry without noticing each time I don’t notice that the inexistence is only half of the noneness and your completeness that hits the swaness is gracing me with kindness with only the very innate kind of attention that anyone with anything that seems to be living can but not feel in the half of it all the all of it.
 

An Ode to Fortum

A neurotic frontal gale again.
Damp grey lichen clinging to 
granite ligaments and trees swing
intraorbitally in darkness.
Rolling with no palpebrae, upwards,
Exposing cranial roots, grinding
wood and stone even the evergreen 
are temporary.

We sit inside, candles lit, eating riborio rice.
Impotent with no electricity, swaddled in glass wool,
We are kaput, dehydrating, on a DIY Sunday.
I lie fasciata under synthetic covers wanting
Not to sway, popping skin on keys:
Imagining what Zygotes could be tomorrow.

Back in the dark ages, I feel happy we will start talking to the neighbours,
Free of current, unitied in our struggle without power.
Having stored all our useful information in vunerable archives, 
and consumed too much aluminium we will soon forget what the future was.
Intraorbitably kaput we will begin to share, 
Become zygotes all over again.

I only have a few minutes left before my computer will definitively sleep
And I just wanted to mention that I always admired your zygomi,
Perhaps obsessively, and I admired how your face seemed like a sorriso
even when resting.  Now as I shut down I will be left wondering if labile
has something to do with laziness or lips with lapids,
and then probably fall asleep.