THe hydrangeas are being dried away
Under the heat of boiling rains.
The air is still and heavy with the secrets
Of trapped behind their doors people pf Tokyo.
Rain and heat, heat and rain.
At once, together or separately, in turn.
But part of one same, long, ambiguous summer.
The night stumbled
With long strings of blue
Into my nostrils.
I inhaled its paleness
And filled my lungs with peace.
Not even one lost moth
Disturbed its fragile stillness.
Bursting into fresh tears
The sky immortilised itself.
Storming inside my thoughts
Yours image zoomed in and out.
The pefume of dieing incense
Shook my breathing tonight.
I waited and waited…
When loneliness doesn’t go away, you remember it’s time to get drunk. Wine… Red… White… Beer, gin, whisky, tequila,vodka…. Separate, together….As long as it’s alcohol and makes you feel lame and stupid. They say getting drunk makes you forget things. Then why is it that it always enhances my loneliness and sense of ridiculousness, lameness and lucklessness? With every new drop of wine, beer, gin or whisky… Separated or together…. With every drop, the painstakingly clear spectre of why I am doing it…How can they say it helps forget? How could they all lie…As if spreading this mean false rumour would give a post-drunkness satisfaction of fooling those who never tried it, luring them into the same mistake? The reason is always there, in front of you, it never fades away, it only acquires gargantuan proportions, it turns blacker, smellier, noisier… The reason why…
Are there more reasons? It can always be only one, the same old reason that makes us all wanna try that old foolish remedy: alcohol… It is love.
-Don’t put ‘love’… It’s so pathetic…
-Then what?
-Put… deceit…
-No ,no… Hopelessness!
-That word doesn’t even exist… Put…
-Ok then, I won’t put anything…
Out in the chilling wind, in the clean night, she can finally be alone. She can be alone from loneliness. Can she?… She stumbles on the concrete stairs and cries.
‘desole. je voule te dire avant mai… mon ami vient juste d’annule la party de vendredi soir. Petre la semaine proch…’ read the mail on her mobile phone, the new one she bought after losing the last one in an overcrowded last train ride she spent enchanted in those ambiguous arms last November. ‘Noche de adrenalina, vamos a celebrar, amar no es un pecado, es un privilegio’ sang her tiny and much dreamed of iPod, the one she finally bought as an ultimate remedy to her disease, when she had it bursting violently last February, after those arms suddenly unfolded.
As she got out of the subway exit, she was joyfully welcomed by the laughing sunbeams and she returned their smile. ‘I must be strong. Life is beautiful. The sunbeams are beautiful. It’s a nice day.’ Repeating such nonsensical sentences in her mind, rolling them voluptuously like woolfian lollipops made her good eventually. Or so she thought… How could she be sure of anything? ‘Certainties only exist for the narrow minded’ she believed.
-Salut. Ca va? Her boyfriend kissed her. The sun was still shining above the clock tower and all the students were enjoying the lunch break.
-Late as usual… her best friend or ex best friend or just friend noted.
-I’m sorry…
-Are we ready? Her boyfriend asked.
-No, we’re still waiting for Marco…
-What are you reading there?… The ex best friend asked seizing a small ‘what do I know about…?’ series book from a girl’s hands. Oooo, en francais! He later exclaimed, after skimming it.
-Mais biensur… Her friend or ex friend or no friend replied smiling, seizing it back, drawing a quick gracious arch with her book-holding hand. It’s Alain’s, since he left his library with me when he moved out. But when he came back for them I only returned him half of it. Now I have a lot to read. She explained in a high pitched voice so that not even one ear would be deprived of the subtle meanings it implied.
-Ciao! Marco dropped precisely at the right moment, leaving her no time to further consider the already all too known style of her no friend. They kissed on both cheeks and she was happy to see him.
They had lunch together.
Are there more reasons? It can always be only one, the same old reason that makes us all wanna try that old foolish remedy: alcohol… It is vanity.
And if one flood unleashed upon us all
Should engulf the trace of our passing,
At least one last hydrangea remains
To keep up pace with rivers, oceans, waves.
One fragile mark of ephemeral lust
Will forcefully, eventually get drenched.
It is the fate of all of us to die
But let’s give hope a raft to swim upland.
Missing the qualities tp concretely purchase a hidden dream
Missing all the strong points to make others believe what I do not
Missing one clear idea about how our future should look like
Missing the chance whch reluctantly opens before my eyes
Missing a firmer faith in people, world, destiny and myself
Missing my gifts and unborn skills of tearing down all fantasies
Missing my place, my time, my tears, my rage, myself
Missing this entire universe damped in ice-cold doubt
But unmissing one only certitude unshaddowed by cruel hopes.
One last sparrow in the filthy rainy air
Calling for its unaccountably aging mate.
My cry of joy for having found a place to call
A place to smell, to taste and touch relentlessly.
A place of late belonging and obsession.
A valley down your back, between two shoulder bones.
Piercing once more with tears
Of surreal pristine beauty
In the cloggy taste of summer evenings
One long moment of prennial waiting
Leading our unrequitted feelings
Towards the imminent denouement
Of draining, bleeding, drowning.
Born from the joining of two of the most basic words in any language, ‘house’ and ‘work’, the concept of housework is, considering its spectacular evolution in time, hard to define even nowadays. Or perhaps it is nowadays more than ever, as the industrial revolution and the booming progress of science have dramatically improved not only the time one spends doing the chores, but also the general attitude towards it. Indeed, in modern times, more and more men are starting to help their female partners with the housework, partly because of the development of easy to use house appliances, partly thanks to the equalisation of gender roles inside the family. It seems that all has been evolving for the best, that now the chores seem to be more enjoyable and the partners share the responsibility, yet nevertheless is trusting machines with everything the ideal choice?
The quality and quantity of housework has always varied with time. One can hardly compare the amount of time a middle class housewife from a century ago was spending with the chores to the time it takes a modern housewife to cook and clean the house. Not only did the invention of the microwave, the washing machine and the vacuum-cleaner improve the quantity of the daily housework, but also its quality. Wives no longer have to suffer from backaches or sore-eyes due to sweeping and sewing, while the meals prepared even days in advance can be easily heated and consumed at any time by the long-hour working husbands.
Moreover, the entire gender-roles mentality shaken to its core in recent years, with more and more women choosing high-stress and decision-making careers, the housework has ceased to be the traditionally-thought exclusive female burden. More and more men are helping their partners with the chores, while children also learn to assume responsibility in managing simple tasks like throwing the garbage or washing the dishes. Accordingly, there is an increasingly climate of mutual respect and solidarity inside the family.
All these obvious improvements in both the performance and the attitude towards housework are allowing human being to allow more time and energy for more meaningful activities, such as study, taking up sports or travelling. On the other hand, however, was housework such a dreadful thing? Was peeling apples with ones brothers and sisters for the Christmas cake such a scare-off or was washing the carpets in the nearby river with all your friends, between jokes and water-splashes something someone might never want to remember again? In the end, isn’t trusting the machines with all the housework just another sign of the irreversible alienation of the modern man, who finds himself lost and alone in an artificial world of its own creation?
June 20th
One night I stood up to the wind
And longed to yield into its breath.
But my phone rang, my heart succumbed
Cause answer I did not.
For why would anyone give out
Their only hope in search of vain
Terrestrial uncertainties of lies?
There’s but one truth above it all
And thats is all I got: your love.
My hand remained outstreched
Into the falling night
And like Ophelia I floated
Through the streams of time,
While memories of past and future
Poured waterfalls into my veins.
The late camelias unleashed
Their rotting smell into the heavy, humid air.
Far from the place I once belonged to
Too close to that I neves shall,
Trapped halfway through between too lands
Of equal future sterile longings,
I can’t reach out until I see
One third illusion in the stars,
A constellation of the dreaded truth,
That lands may shake and I might stand.
June 21st
The glaze of sunbeams cooked roofs
Is glowing in the few sweat drops
That fell from my thirsty lips
One humid hot afternoon.
My youth got drenched in dreams
comsumed by one suffocating will,
Too much and too often repressed:
To stop myself from being me.
June 15th
Spinning in waves of silence
The stars blew cold embraces
To the summer breeze entangled
One of those nights, between my locks.
I spinned with them in drunken faith
That you may see my signs and know .
Yet far so near and so untamed,
The lonely moon alone winked back.
June 17th
One drop of cold wind
And the sun winked to my face
Sometimes a thousand words
Are emptier than silence.
My one and only dream
Bestowed on me one chilly night
Was to uproot the seeds of hope
Inside the nonexistent sole of heart.
Instead I found that with the rainy days of June,
My dream has rotten and my hopes
Like mushrooms in the putrid shaddow
Embraced themselves with mildew shields.
Why do I get yet once again
Drowned in my own confession?
Unknown and mystical, alas,
I have one last compassion.
To see the sparkle in time’a eyes
I’ll let you live for longer
Inside my veins, out of my heart
And get me drunk with hunger.
I wait for one last train to pass
Before I sink my shaddow
Into the lateness of the rain
And out into the rainbow.
All people hurried through the doors
To gain one second’s labour
And yet you have remained unmoved
While eyes sought eyes’ endeavour,
Your lips embracing mine.
The trumpets once announced a death
And morning mournings were once heard
For all the stars began to fall
And all the moons to shake
Awaiting one arrival,
One long, last expectation
Has seized the waters and the sky
For how can we depart and not arrive?
In lonely hours of the night,
Not one fade sound is to be heard
Just losing pace with my own breath,
The monn’s light overwhelmed
With shaddows of the past and future.
But they can’t dare to pierce the curtains
Where you once got entangled,
For there’s a charmsupon them now
And i am off to sleeping.
