Monday 23 September 2024

Three Poems by Giulio Magrini

 




A Response to the Loss of Sinéad O’Connor

 

Not the previous and unscented fragrance of lavender  

Soft caresses on eager bodies  

That would have welcomed tenderness 

 

What to do with love spoken to the deaf  

Unheard and expressed to a rubbery wall 

Of elastic spirit 

Defaced muted mocked  

Flowing in a river of callous responses  

Within regretful days  

 

Sleepwalking within her unburied corpse 

Regret surges through our decaying hearts 

Memory endures withered and foul 

Stuck in contemporary sorrow 

Missed opportunity  

And incessant loss  

As every fresh emotive attempt  

Befouls in exasperation and futile continuation 

 

To these present smothered 

Expressions without blossoms  

Wilted wasted withheld and unreceived 

Now choked and rotting in full view 

Living with a prophecy detailed in song 

By a priestess of memory and enlightenment 

 

And the art remains but the source  

Suffocated by worshipers  

Naïve of complicity  

In the murder of genius and discovery 

The killing gene dominates and continues to triumph 

 

“Can't you forgive  

What you think I've done?”* 

 

*From This Is a Rebel Song by Sinéad O'Connor

 



DAYS SLIP AWAY


On orthodoxy

 

You exhale tragedies 
Seal doors of diversity 

To basic black and a simple blouse 

Embellished with hair and lunch appointments 

Under the equivalence and certainty  

Of being saved 

 
Droning compartmentalized 

Satellites 

Encircle your frenetic schedule 

Supply your honey-less buzz  

To the barren and desiccated flowers 

That exaggerate your proper geometric garden  

Oblivious that the days slip away 

 

You carry the privilege of a woman’s burden  

Support the nest  

And mutter your continuing inventory  

Of snide remarks about your vacant ex 

 

Your children have secured and frittered 

Socially acceptable professional men 

That have given you progeny  

We hear bulletins of children  

In the background 

A droning siren’s song  

In anxious and damaged pitch 

 

You notice your daughters 
Have taken to strange behavior 

Which will disappear if ignored 
They exhale tersely that  

The medication was specialist prescribed 

 

It is your mission to understand your role 
To imprint the necessary values to the bloodline 
Which was written long ago 

By bearded dead white men  

In an old book you trust 

 

The brown the unsaved  

The children of marginals  

Do not factor in your agenda 

You cannot hear the cries of alternative children  

Because you do not see alternative children 

Their hunger cannot exist 

You cocoon in your comfort zone 

A small room of your design 

The volume not turned up 

The colors inoffensive 

The nutrients unseasoned 

 

You live with the value 

Of the invisible jesus 

And your friends who believe  

In the invisible jesus 

And the insurance policy  

The invisible jesus markets  

On main street near the starbucks  

And the other starbucks 

 

You forward emails  

About the deterioration of America 

And the attacks from the evil others 

You are the Christian white  

And the conservative right 

Sin is a product of the misdirected 

 

You have not wondered about the time 

As the days slip away  

 

There is a fight song, colours 

And a flag to salute 

And you are very fortunate  

To know the cues 

To interpret them to others 

Who have not seen the light 

  

You know what must be done  

To march in the parade 

Of the veritable cause  

To lay the bricks of the one road 

That will lead us in victory  

To the destination  

That has been sanctified  

And consecrated  

By the invisible jesus 

 

You lust for the  

Blood of the enemy 

You can guarantee it with guns  

You are privileged to have by law 

Your bouquet of gun powder encircles you 

And mutes the weeping from the eyes 

Of those unable to see sons and daughters 

Buried by your rights  

And the products of your greater mission 

  

Gunshots, explosions, rioting, starvation 

And the most terrible weapon of all 

The unsubtle deprivation of education 

 

You are able to survey the destruction 

From the top of your polluted pyramid 

And you have not wondered about the time 

As the days slip away  

And you are not aware 

 

If you are right about the invisible jesus 

He will for a nominal sum  

Prepare you for a cell  

In your whimsical heaven  

Where the pedestrian oblivious  

Putrefy in detached spirit  

Do not fret 

He will not condemn or punish you 

Punish you 

Punish you 

 

Your life of ignorance and sensory deprivation 

Has earned you the comfortable rewards 

Of blunted stones  

 

No pain will touch you 

No pleasure did  

Your remembrances of neutral 

Will comfort you 

 

You will live in a death map  

Where all is outlined 

And no chances are taken 

No alternatives no colors 

No opinions 

Just the disinterested promise  

Of your disharmonious life 

Where your mortal days have finished 

And you live in the eternity 

Of the distillate of your constraint


 

 

REFLECTIONS DURING THE LAST VOYAGE

 

And I hear the voices of the wind 

In the sails of the mizzenmast 

My closing frigate caresses the stillness 

Great wings stretch from the hull 

Into the clouds of glory  

Where the sagacious long beards  

Squint and mutter  

As they review my obedience 

To the dictums of the lord 

I gaze at my life 

Thundering visions through skies  

The curtain has closed after me 

I am overwhelmed  

With the roar of nothing 

And I question 

The meaning of this  

I know I am ended 

But I am not certain my end 

Is the finish 

 

I remembered initial lumps of fat 

Crawling on a throw rug 

Drooling in a highchair 

Mystified by the growls 

From the giants overhead 

I stream rolling tears 

And present a fleshy wail of fear 

To the grimaces above 

 

The smell of a soiled baseball 

The perfume of dirt grass and DNA  

Tangled in the leather and stitching 

Connects me to every kid 

Playing inside the laws of the game 

There can be no greater triumph 

Typified by these scents  

They enhance my focus  

And the protostar of life 

It triggers explosions  

Of immature light 

Encouraged in those days 

 

My loathed gangling  

Uncoordinated mess of tissue 

Birthing sex and disoriented behavior 

A disarray of hysteria and panic 

The penance of puberty 

This adolescent scourge  

Disguised as a gift  

 

Then the ensuing sequence  

The pairing and beating  

Affirmations and slanders 

The victories and the fiascos  

I stride erect in adult supposition 

The credulity of life flows through my beliefs 

Like a cyclone through a house of cards 

I stand in absurdity  

Through the wagers of my life 

For a great unprepared mystery 

 

I emerge at a time of bleeding and consumption  

They gave me one blueprint  

And my unbuilt house did not reflect  

On the soundness of the plan 

Or suggest alternatives for shelter 

 

These were hungry days 

Before the onset of choice  

In a compulsion to invite corpulence  

To the collisions of my life 

 

These conflicts stimulated 

Comfort and a craving for regularity 

Not the offerings of diversity 

I was the obedient two-legged reactive 

Standing sitting clapping smiling on cue 

I clearly remembered the intelligentsia  

Scolded Amadeus  

“Too many notes” 

 

I am left with the sum of my feedings 

A stew of gossip and blather 

That has simmered forever 

In the pots of incarceration  

From recipes in the kitchens  

Of church and state 

I may have come to this moment sluggishly 

Or in a flashing instant of caprice 

 

I am in the beyond 

There are no written laws 

To protect me  

Or escape from 

No craving for war  

Collaborator’s joy and despair are vanished 

They are on a road I no longer travel  

I marvel at the disappearance  

Of the bars of human love and community  

Through penitentiaries of life 

Now transferred to my present 

Freedom of isolation  

I wonder at the shallowness of liberty 

When there is nothing to be freed from 

 

The threat of foreboding mystery 

Has disappeared with me 

And closes with this vestige of ship 

 

I begin to fade in progressions 

Darkening shades of gray towards black 

And absorb the entirety of spirit 

Draining into space 

Becoming the nothing 

 

And the perfect ending  

Of my beginning before the womb


 



 

Giulio Magrini has been nominated by Lothlorien Press for a Best of the Net award and for a Pushcart Prize by Brownstone Poets. The Color of Dirt is an anthology of his poetry and flash fiction. Giulio asks interested readers in the USA and Canada to contact him by email giulio27@verizon.net and request the book for a personalized copy. The anthology is also available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. As Giulio Magrini tells us, “We have put our hands in the dirt and sanctified each other.

 

 

 

 

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