You can break God like a yolk, but it is necessary for the hands to be sharp.
Everything I have learned from life, rudiments, language and occupation,
is about to buzz, like a neon or an orb, at the end of a pale-emerald Wednesday.
With any luck, our days will ripen into vineyards that will see better vintages.
If it is true that words tell more than the body’s end, speak of our failure again,
chrysanthemum today and cruel as a stern hour; it breaks like a syllable in a mouth
or speaks as one who has secretly witnessed a miracle. Indeed, much of our death
accumulates through inertia; they knocked down the bones of god’s tongue on our homes,
begging us to leave the crime scene as intact. In the rooms next to the world’s great
pollution, plants pierced the walls to lace onto our ventilators. If there’s one thing
you don’t know, it is that I prayed so hard that it filled my lungs.
A god-filled nurse was standing by the bed, fixing up the trajectory
of my artificial satellite in the orbit of the moon-lamp. The precise moment
when everything is direction & praise, without injuries or mirrors; the way
you’ve always been more than the sum of the parts – now lingers on,
like a name unhooking from language; pulses through the walls,
like a wind-swallowed hovel. Satisfaction here is an accustomed cat – but
does it worship me? Leave the body behind, says the cat. Good things thin out,
crackling in the cupboards; the even more good things evade, huddling around
the ashes to disappear. Taking part in this life takes away our good fortune
to multiply it. This means: beware of the harm hidden in the clock.
Whenever we gaze at the time, life comes crashing down on us with what
it has managed to accumulate up to that moment. As a student, I was crushed
under the weight of the laws of statics & conversations; I got up too late, lagging
behind the body, and I broke breath like glass. (Mary) what you don’t know
is that we are like wind, basting a tongue to everything we need. According to
the dead, what cannot be said will find sooner or later a way to wet our tongues.
Bring it to the shore of the mouth and sprinkle salt all around. Some mornings,
I swear life is so clear as to obscure the fact that one is living it; certain hours
settle on us like parrots while outside it’s just yet another bloom.
— Alessandro is a teacher and he currently lives in Italy. Previously, he pursued a Bachelor’s Degree in Modern Literature and a Master’s Degree in Anthropology and Social Research at the University of Siena. His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review and Atelier.