There are no more pedestrian muses
strolling by.
Now they roam about
in trendy scooters
and don't give a damn
to solitary poets
writing in coffee houses,
park benches.
They walk no more
in beauty. Unseen
they write the beauty by
waxing elegies to nature
to their own bodies.
They're their own muses.
Let's say a mirror
or rather an emerald stone
reflecting the Eternal City
wrapped in raging flames
as the ire of Vesuvius
enshrouds the Tyrrhenian waters..
Rome is burning:
the Porticus, the Circus Maximus;
the bustling Subura, the Argentilum,
the Velabrum, the fragant
gardens of Tiber...
The Caesar gazes at the sudden blaze
through an emerald stone like a mirror,
drinks a frothy wine in silver cup,
and recites the Illupersis
at the rhythm of a Greek zither...
He smiles at the green flames
engulfing the Eternal City to ashes.
Tipsy, slumberous in some kind of bliss,
He kisses the rosy fingers of effete boys
who gather round his horselaughing.
At last, the emerald stone only reflects
the yawn of a worn-out Emperor.
the bad omen that portends to see
a famished wolf eating cinders
in the hands of Juno at sunrise.
The Speculum Majus of Vincent de Beauvais
consisted of four massive mirrors unfolding
as a catoptric theater
1) the Mirror of Nature
2) the Mirror of Knowledge
3) the Mirror of Moral
4) the Mirror of History
What we live along our existence
is only a magical approximation to reality:
deceptive epiphanies reflected on the incessant
mirrors of our daily grind.
Deceitful visions that gleam back to us
Nature, Knowledge, Moral and History.
I have no name.
Je m'appelle myself the wine
quaffed by Petrarch a rainy day in Avignon
while he kissed the blue aura of Laura
over a bunch of alexandrine verses.
Je m'appelle either blackbird, watermelon,
Brahma, Sophia or Grasmere Lake...
Je m'appelle the sound of water
caressed by your hand that only exists
if time doesn't.
Je m'appelle Ominaeshi, Persimmon,Holden Caufield,
the rustle of the wind on the sunflowers.
the dialogue between the northern lights and the pinewoods.
Je m'appelle "mono no aware", "lacrimae rerum"
and sometimes they call me "toska" or white melancholia.
I was born a wandering minstrel,
they named me Random.
I was born male and female at once
and I should have called myself Orpheus
or primordial nymph.
Just at the moment of my birth
all the cats of the world mewed in unison,
all the dolphins leapt from the waves to the sunrise.
And just at the moment of my death
all the stellar cumuli of the universe will become
the one and unique star of my last laughter.
World-weary here am I
watching the slick green of saplings
at autumn.
The sun, by and by,
will be just a memory
of another day gone,
another waste light.
But dark withal
and so with rained thoughts
I can make something out
of the trilling thrushes
and the crystalline murmur
of ghosts and rivulets:
some truth renewing itself
unnoticed to the fold,
revealed only to
the world-weary people
at sunset.
I am son of myself
(like Empedocles)
Before I was plant, fish,
bird and maiden
(Like Empedocles)
So if I now jump off
to the upwelling
Etna magma
(like Empedocles)
which one is about to die?
Myself or my son?
Mutter, ich bin dumn ("Mother, I am a fool") Nietzsche
In Hyde Park a preacher took a pratfall up to the moon from his soapbox,
and everybody laughed in China.
Definition of glory: graveyard wherein the soil falls
upward instead of downward.
He wanted to leave this world through the main gate, in grand style, but eventually
popped off through a pop-hole.
He wanted to be laid to rest with his loved-ones, but ended up with the hated-ones.
In that country a poet was off his leash, and mauled another poet to death.
Studious-looking by the river the poet,
in reality only flicks through dirty mags.
Ignorance is recyclable. Knowledge, biodegradable.
It takes so long to be not an idiot, and only a second to become one again.
The universe is nothing more than an upscale dunghill. That's why in Ancient Egypt
they worshipped the dung beetle as a sacred beast.
"Je voudrais être un cochon: l'homme seul peut être ridicule". Paul Gauguin
The State is an Amusement Park full of over-rational children.
"The law is the Amusement Park of Pain" Louis F. Celine
"the beautiful fiction of the law" Charles Dickens
I am my own booty of my own piratical forays into myself.
Someone was tampering with the course of the universe when I was born.
In my late childhood, I was convinced that dwarves and cats-like the universe-
never die.
Impossible to poem the memories of all my imaginary loves.
"With an apple I will stun Paris"-said Cezanne.
I will stun London with a durian.
I was born at rest, unrest.
Today everything is quite similar to everything and nothing at the same time.
I am a defendant accused of being just me. The Devil's always offering
to be my lawyer pro bono.
"I'm going to do with ya what the moon uses to do with poets: ignoring'em."
Everywhere you come across idiots who believe themselves poets, and poets who deem themselves as God.
We are all putty in the hands of a playful and mischivous God.
""We know that the Muses were women, and we know every day of our lives that the Fates
are women" Charles Dickens
We are only status updates posted by God daily. And daily disappearing.
Nietzsche defined himself as "a fatality in pyjamas". I am the selfsame fatality but in boxers.
"Dieu etait un tres mauvais communicant" (Michel Houellebecq)
Every war that breaks out in this planet is a cut of God having a clean shave.
God takes a potshot at us every day.
I suspect God is a serial killer running away at light speed. He will never be caught.
God is a technocrat who trades in the stock market of suffering.
"In the beginning was the word"(John, 1:1)...
But God keeps flannelling on and on.
"J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise" Arthur Rimbaud
God, in the other life, was a stand-up comedian.
Written off as a suspect of murdering God,
the philosopher was declared caretaker God.
Earthquakes are the sneeze of the Devil.
"Satan's bet is still on" Alberto Manguel
There might come a time when all the human beings can be bound in brotherhood...The endogamy will do the rest.
Birds will never nest wherever people want.
And people will never know whatever birds think.
Humbleness hardly ever bloom in the genius as a rose-like virtue.
Rather as the last resource of the defeated.
Definition of life: a mighty polygraph that someone lays hidden in the words.
She told me: "I like you just the way you are". She should have told me, "I don't like the way you will be"
Tourists are the absent-minded inspectors of Hell.
"Tourists are souls doing penance" Adam Zagajewski
Hope is carnivorous.
Hope is a woman in broody urge who, sadly, becomes childless.
"The dead hunting and the alive, ahunted" Frank O'Hara
Many men deserve l'oubli but l'oubli deserves so many men?
I am my own scarecrow shooing away the thousand crows of my anxiety.
I've just hit the nail that rounded off my crucifixion.
It is not about to get lost in the woods anymore but in the stars.
All books of poetry intend to be a clarifying footnotes of dreams.
"Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure, not its influence
as religious or political propaganda." Sylvia Plath
The exile is born and die endlessly in a lifetime.
Impossible to unearth the gold of facts.
Fate is the mother of things.
This business of living is becoming, day by day, something quite spatial more than special.
They don't bring children to this world anymore but books.
He wrote his curriculum vitae in several heavy volumes,
and won the Booker Prize.
The world is a hankie teeming with virtual snot.
"The world seemed made of concentric circles of mockery" Susan Sontag
The present is always crammed with insurers of insecurity.
"Hey wooden boy, don't get so close to the flames", told off Pinocchio a tramp warming his hands at a bonfire.
Anyone scared of the unsteadiness of the ground has the right to believe himself an orangutan, and never to climb down from the trees.
"Are we alone in the whole universe?", asked me a tobacconist while I nibbled on a bacon sandwich.
What is the point of knowing if we are alone in the whole universe, if I don't know why I am alone in myself?
