Category: English poetry

nights with the prince of cool, dim street lights
outside the window, a glass of water enough
to accidentally blur a crooked handwritten note
on the back of your old life bill. sometimes
you turn the turntable down a little to hear her
laugh in the street. but usually you just follow
the path of the trumpet. my funny valentine
sang for the last time.

back at home… a phrase that, even after over a year,
i still feel uneasy saying. and i am not bothered by
the penny plain furnishings, as long as the bookshelves
are full, or the lack of a proper bed, when the folding
mattress does the job. because this is all i really need,
apart from a desk with a lamp and a fairly comfortable
armchair. and yet, something is still missing. or maybe
someone.

i am not looking for a woman
to die for, but one that i would like
to live for. i could take her to the lake,
pretending we were just paying a family visit,
and then caress the surface of the water
as if it were the skin of her arm
lying next to mine. but the truth is,
i am not looking for a woman
beyond the caress of a verse.

i am a man. but what does it mean?
to be clear, it is not about my flat chest
and what is in my pants. it is not even
that i am three times more likely to take
my own life than an average woman is,
compared to whom my life expectancy
is four years shorter anyway, or that i could
be one of the vast majority of rough sleepers
or prison inmates. the problem is, i feel
lost. is this what lycurgus foresaw? maybe.
i am just not convinced i would like to live
like a lacedaemonian.

it is five in the morning and my maltese friend just woke me up
to let me know how much he appreciates my stanzas. i am cold.
the temperature dropped below zero, so i moved my mattress
closer to the radiator. the silence outside is suddenly bursting
with the shouting of the last marauders returning from their night out.
then, the upstairs neighbour begins a concert of creaking floors.
he heard them too. and although i know the chance for me to fall
back to sleep is gone, and that the young shelley is waiting for me,
i give myself another moment. this is my intimate one-on-one
with indeterminacy.

i do not remember if i was young
for long, if i had a teddy bear, or if i was
afraid of the monsters under the bed.
the first song fell into oblivion, as did
the first dance. but i got lucky. i learned
to read and nothing was ever the same.
only that i immersed myself in reading
about life and actually stopped living.
and now i do not know who i am
beyond the paper world of mine.

people find me funny when i am angry
because i am angry, although usually
just sad and otherwise unremarkable.
and there is also that fine line between
acceptance and the resigned shrug at all
that one considers one’s fate.

many years have passed since i learned the greek alphabet.
the first cause was, as always, the blind bard from ionia,
followed by the three tragedians and the father of comedy.
but the symbols once drawn by the hand of plato and aristotle
now mainly represent the variants of concern, with the omicron
just beginning to fill the red lists.

lapped with gusts of wind, the longing sound
of violins sinks into the rapids of pavement,
flooding the rainy day with pachelbel’s canon.
i look less and less at an emaciated calendar
with a handful of pages left to be torn off,
the last leaves on the tattered birch tree
outside the window, with no hope nestling
into the granite.