Once a month we host an Open Mic here in Florence at the Hostel Tasso. Last night I got Nadia Koski and Marcello from Sushi Rain to help me with out with an old love poem of a sort.

Santa Maria Novella Station’s soft

Fascism: barricades, budella

Della tu’ ma’, bunkers

soldiers shouting through cellphones

at unlistening travelers.

Everyone runs from the trumpet

the mayor’s thugs shove

up our ass. The city’s visiting card:

a boot stamping on a human

face for eternity, Florence,

Your humanism is the worst sham

A travel agent ever sold.

3/24/2015

Florence

Three Poems for Bill Gainer

 

This Economy


I can use this blade
one more week
if I draw it hard across
my face, ignore
the nicks and chafing.


               11/9/2014
               Florence


 

I think of each
warm Autumn sun as the last
of summer

Consequently,
I enjoy the fiction longer
than any actual season


               2/10/2014
               Florence






Florence is the corpse
of a city crawling
with frat boys and blind Japanese
tourists

Bologna teems
with living, breathing Italians


               2/10/2014
               Bologna

My first ever Haiku

Sudden thunderstorm

scurrying shoppers — plastic,

'cept a wet baguette

Florence

The Man from Mandrax

The Man from Mandrax

Mandrax seed in a dead man’s coat, I stalk the floodplain until recently held to be a Venetian phenomenon. Crackling seals re-perform my crime for random passerby in drastic madams’ elastic tokens. Gone. Another flat-ended puddle of flax: liminal, pointing eastward. Signed, sealed, delivered. I’m disguised as a junkie of old—they stare at me outside of the soup kitchen. It rains still and, huddled in niches, the snails emerge towards their hallowed wine and tobacco hollows. One toke, one toke—only a motion away.

At a hiccup’s pace, not necessarily stoned, butt-ended avalanche of water, or waiting, of wine and sandbags. Dramamine helps one to lean with the city’s rocking gait. An oasis palmed in plaid, deflated, then drowned, newly navigable as carburetors cough up blood and conk out. In that, another deed indeed gets done.

The sun may never shine again, undone as Newflorence’s Renzi's-pavement’s laced with mercury, a mirror to the falling water, upward in a twin so thin against hidden stones and sea-ment, no seed to take over mortar, no earth beneath our feet, only moons, a mutually attracted collaborator to the weight, an image in the sky of the night we exiled electronically orange, crucifying all good intentions for the season ‘tis for regretting the folly of poverty with all them gifts.

But quit? It don’t seem likely—not in a text anyway, a mandate for decent proceeding onto the next hanged man giving birth to worlds of poisonous offspring in stolen coats who never look back but only forward to vengeful revolutions.

11/28-9/2012

Florence and Bologna

The Siege of San Marco

The event staves off its message / each picture begetting another on down the isle / a day’s work / done the humble meal / a fire at night / no doubt, in winter / Savonarola’s tears / on the pulpit to come  //  Staves off the decision / marks down the outlines / on down the isle / images that return / “The same damn saint,” says the American turning away  //  They won’t be able to blame us for bullets / resting assured of some king of kings / for whom they have voted / and all that judgment crap  //  They hire / executioners all day long / up against these walls / each one with a paintbrush / and then to sleep / in the simple cell  //  The making and the undoing of the day and the night / stacked out by the outhouse / grinding glass for the red (bloodpaint) / soaking in the sin / to contain the sight, the stare / looking into the sun / or hugging a cross / with blind faith  //

6/26/1990

Florence

SAN SALVI

« La follia è una condizione umana. In noi la follia esiste ed è presente

come lo è la ragione. Il problema è che la società, per dirsi civile,

dovrebbe accettare tanto la follia quanto la ragione, invece incarica una scienza, la psichiatria, di tradurre la follia in malattia allo scopo di eliminarla.

Il manicomio ha qui la sua ragion d'essere. »

(Franco Basaglia)

PART ONE

i

from the inside of inside, from a place inside each of us where no other approaches, i speak with a voice that demands quieting, even if such a voice can’t be heard outside, where we are all vulnerable, in our uniqueness, in our power, in our heartbreaking desire to desire, to be other than what we are by being with another, where we know we are like no other and can never be, because we speak, from the inside of inside, among the drowned, even as they try to save us, because we are outside of belonging, inside belonging's power but outside of its truth, inside an inside, put away, hidden even from the city that surrounds this city, the speaking deafness of our outward personae, the curse of humankind, drown in our own individuality.

there is a burning red wound in the night, a lamp lit before the madonna, another imagined other that some can hide inside themselves, here, where to make a sound would be a sacred taking up of sides, drowning in refusal, another symptom, the inability to take part, more than a simple silence, our fear turned outwards, from inside this inside, an internal escape, an illusory impulse to flee, down this tree-lined avenue, its omnipresent dogs, its expected squatters' graffiti, these desperate political measures, and the walking dead, its walls a monument to hiding my refusal.

survivors have some nerve, surviving, but the drowned drown easily, in politics, la lotta, in protest, committed to their causes, the ends supplying the means, mouthing others' words, other rooms, other voices, so many agendas, so many programs, we being committed because of our effects, the abandoned church here becoming central to our twilight perambulations, bleeding red and luminescent the whole sleepless night through, some nerve, surviving, our effects confiscated, in the belly of firenze, in the womb of the city, in san salvi, where they think that they're saving us from ourselves when really they're saving us from their own indignation, what they might do to us, and their church, built to faith, belief in something that they know to be impossible, the uncertain certainty that there is something called reality that we all know too much about, that could be squashed with a faked miracle or two.

i, on the other hand, have no faith, not in their science nor their god, their sacred belief in conquering disbelief, or the red wound they would cut into the night in the name of his mother, offer up to his mother, against the night's natural darkness, this voice spits on their desire to quiet the inside of inside, even though its speaking tortures me, i know that its silence tortures them, once and for all, the voice of trauma, the voice of protest, the wound, refusal and resistance, abnegation and fear, even in this tree-lined avenue, even in this garden-filled fortification, a silent fortress walled into the heart of the city, into the mind of the city—i will not say soul—images imagined or born of the day-to-day, the real, what does it matter? inside the inside, interiority itself, a new-town of non-belonging and refusal, an outsider internalized, encircled by san salvi, san salvi's walls, the drowned saved, drowned again in other voices, other systems, out of sight, misunderstood even as we un-wall our voices, from inside, speaking the speech of disagreement, to imagined companions, the freedom of non-communication.

but i will not be drowned, they tell me, i will emerge eventually and speak the fear of my naked aloneness in their world of agreement and reality, to their world of agreement and so-called reality, spitting, croaking, bleeding out beneath this abandoned madonna in a city of new uses, her candle slitting the night open, the night that must fall, a languishing wound in its comforting darkness, a world that must drown such voices before they are heard and cause some poor woman to abandon home and hearth by loving me and all of my quiet madness.

inside the inside speaks an isolated voice of disagreement, of madness, yes, and sometimes listening but never hearing itself.

 

INBETWEEN --5 chapters

I

All that winter they were ripping up the streets of Europe, the streets of Paris and Florence, the streets of Rome. Scaffolding circles churches, hides triumphal arches, strips of green nylon tarpaulin stretched across its planks and frames. Streets have been uprooted, cobblestones stacked against the walls of black buildings. They're turning hotels into museums, letting the steam out of the sewers, putting statues behind glass; policemen are looking on, machine guns slung over their shoulders. In Rome they don't have any portable electric lights; instead they use little pots of fire that look like the old-fashioned anarchist's bombs in silent movies to warn cars of the edges, where the streets drop off into dusty pits. 

He looks across a muddy hole filled with heavy machinery at a museum. Closed for renovation, the sign says. 

A whole street in the center of Florence has been ripped up; the exclusive shops face each other across a dank pit of reddish earth, and the walls of green-shuttered windows seem to close in on you as you look up. A little rain slips into the narrow streets as Persey hurries home carrying groceries. Other Americans and the well-to-do Florentines pass slowly, laden with colorful brand-name shopping bags. In Paris, between snow flurries, he watches them pouring out cement sidewalks in long strips down the Boulevard St. Michael; they were laying out the streets of Europe that winter. People pass in a hurry, nobody watching the police frisking some Arabs up against a wall.