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
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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