I was just sleeping, because of boredom, and I woke up on an empty boarding platform with its pavement stones blackened. The grass sprouted out victorious among cracks, black as coal. The wind managed to stir up the dry poplars from their dark silence. It was like the meowing of an abandoned black kitten, precociously aware of its color handicap in a hostile world, a special meowing, hollow and squeaky, pathetic and funny altogether, almost begging for a drop of curdled milk, because fresh milk is available for brown striped kittens with a fluffy face.

I began to go round the station aimlessly, feeling through my thin shoe soles that the train approached. I walked in a kind of led armor, tighter and tighter, looking with my half opened eyes towards the moon’s eyelid engulfing the clouds. The train was really coming closer popping from sleeper to sleeper, as if running right or left from its tracks, anyway completely discontent of its compulsory straight road. Its large windows had a phosphorescent shine, therefore resembling from afar with some Christmas decorations in a city with a sky dark as pitch and smoky everywhere.

I wasn’t certain if I dreamed or if I was awake when the train got in my sight. Although I trembled because of cold and fear, I don’t think I would have climbed up. At every window there was a dead body, with its face almost black, and beside every corpse there was a doll all dressed in white: a bride doll with clean and frothy laces and veils floating in the wind. The lights in every compartment were colored differently, crescendo: white, yellow, orange, red, crimson, violet, blue. At the last window it was dark, but, leaning over the sill, I could see the head of a child, safe and sound, laughing wholeheartedly.

Then  I closed my eyes and started to cry. I was no more afraid but I knew  I wasn’t asleep anymore.

It was a tall and white door with the **** at the level of my heart. I knocked discreetly to enter in audience at the cross spider tamer. A fat and redhead man chewing his whiskers minutely. I was wet because of emotion and warm like a freshly hatched chicken. The man spoke with a shrill snigger because it is known that death is not as serious as life. You just swallow a knot in your throat from the corner of the star still left for you. As if you drink hot milk after chickenpox. Sometimes only the sun remains for you and you die in winter. Other times you shake off the stars and the moon from your hair like an autumn willow. You get so annoyed that your eyes roll in their orbits until the spiders stop jolting on your photograph upside down.

It was a perfectly ordinary day. Except for the fact that they sold more tickets at the county fair carousel. Nobody is perfect. Not even those who predict the weather.

if others slithered between two air columns
the child who had never learned the race was running
as if swimming face to face with an ocean’s wall
his head like an iron ball
dragging the motionless body
only as far as the tethered roots could stretch

when his father carried him on his shoulders
the child felt through his nostrils
how the man’s steps slice the air
how the wind passes close to the ears as if
walking is another kind of flight allowed only to others
a perfectly directed music

with all his heart he would have liked to play
like a normal child
to forget he had had wings before growing roots
but others were faster while playing tag
they ran around him avoiding to touch him

he was left to be the savage defeated without fight
the blue acrobat in equilibrium on his ball
from another paradise

it wasn’t me who invented love by my ignorance
the same way the painter doesn’t have the heart
to mix pure colors
it was there
in the times when I used to swot the differences
between useful beautiful and pleasing

first of all there grew a tree with red leaves
like man’s or woman’s lips before the first kiss
leaves were another kind of hands
trembling
preparing to fall
rustle over rustle till the last silence

only by chance I shared the same shadow
with a stranger
for the jealousy of those who did not know me
I waited for centuries close to the old tree trunk
my cheek against the dry ground
I couldn’t refuse him when he asked me
to lend him a leaf
and I didn’t even know
where do young butterflies hide when it rains bitter

people say that
after a day that tree was brought down
today no one kills himself
because of love
they’re simply killed little by little

the house mouse squeaks under the heavy wardrobe
crumbs are falling
from grandpa’s black pipe
the whipped cream ice cream is dry in the compote bowl
the clock fell behind with a couple of polar nights

not I
I didn’t care for old things and I seldom dreamed to taste
carob beans to my heart’s content
rag dolls don’t smile but they laugh
their mouth stretched
double stitched with thread
I
it is a word too big for a three years old child
I forgot three years ago how much I loved from this world
I don’t forgive what’s left for me
that triangle in a circle vanished under my eyelids
traveling stars race
between my lungs’ alveolae

before falling asleep
it gets always cold
the postman rings the way he did when I lost my address
where the world had forgotten me
this is something new
the history still repeating itself
in place of the best gift

I am the prodigal son's mother
I kept the baby swaddled too tightly until he was gone
in the world of temptations
to straighten his knees

I gave the wind my flesh to bite it forty years
in the desert with the rough sack dress over the empty belly  
I washed the feet of sacred statues with oil from olive tree *******
I gave to the rain the color of tears still yelling after my baby
from the mouth of a cavern open in the storm
I learned the barren law
of the ****** souls’ forest

like a sunflower I raised myself at sunrise
going round until the night left me bent to the earth
with my heart black and heavy with my son
who didn’t return
because of my great love

I wonder if you remember Eloisa
the wind gamboling in your sand-colored hair
drifting scents of orange tree flower
and you holding on your chest a crystal swan
with a lithe neck

but he’s gone and you
alike the blessed peace makers
dreamed of forgetting the wedding bells
and the silver trout jumping
or the rain plashes in limpid water
to forget how the vine branch cut before the leaves show out
cries drops of cloudy sap
to cry full of joy because the moon melted the clouds
and you have a blank look and there’s so much silence
that you cannot hear your eyelashes
trembling on your pillow
like a faraway call

Eloisa
the name of forgiveness is not forgetfulness
a north star fell over the frozen lilies in your *****
hoarfrost flowers slowly fall off from the empty cell’s window
a vestal once more
the one who forgets is therefore forgotten…