from Nervous Wanderings

 

The Voice of Water

 

 

by Alessandro Cusimano

 

 

 

 

a dog bitten in the throat

put it in a sack

and thrown in a dumpster

 

born to fight

to devour

 

to suffer

shut in a plastic bag

and squeezed with a rope

 

struggles to the bitter end

 

and girls

 

wearing close-fitting longuettes

beautiful and nasty

jolly or conceited

transparent and winking

 

the Slav type of blonde

sells like hot cakes

 

sexy

fair

blue eyes

 

cold and wild

severe and martial

queens

of an outskirts nazi-porno

 

boys in jeans

shirt

tank top

 

haughty

 

the efforts of one year

in the gym

or to the millstone of the yard

 

and colors

 

lemon yellow

cornflower blue

 

places to spend the afternoon

listening to the voice of water

 

convenient slum

to admire the inconvenience

 

raped land

sand

 

twigs

reeds

 

river

sea

ground

 

without borders

 

an orgy of piled wood

in the form of housing

 

a child here

cannot suffer any opinion

and here

children play the war

against the loneliness

 

a little man

thin and sharp

folded on his chair

watching TV

 

the stench ferments the moisture

crushes the walls

and sneaks out

with rats and cockroaches

 

at the bottom of the main road

three caravans

leave behind syringe vending machines

hanged on breached fences

 

young people in their natural cruelty

gay prostitutes

premonitory dreams

and scenes shared at the tavern

 

the melodrama lives on with the easy tear

but it’s a dry tragedy

 

lingering in pandering concessions

to pandering landscapes

or strong closeups

 

in oral tales in their living speech

 

within reach

 

baby girls with the lipstick

faces of Christ turning up from t-shirts

mobile phones

tattoos

 

sweaty people

who don’t understand

waiting for something to happen

 

then

everyone returns to his stories

after a seaside resort interval

 

in the unstable space

which is alcove

restaurant

office

 

empty

full

womb

 

against the fellow man

 

the feeling of suffocation

overcrowding

emptied vacuum

 

at night

the pushers greet the big cars

 

hawaiian shirts

cigarettes

gold chains

convicts in a break

 

in an almost balanced cosmos

 

the forced segregation

gives a life closer

to the everyday deceptions

 

these voices ignore
and destroy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alessandro Cusimano was born in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, on July 2, 1967.  He lives in Rome, where he is jewelry designer, writer, poet and translator.  Son of a painter and a teacher, his life was marked, very early, by recurrent and painful bouts of depression.  Nevertheless, this did not detract him from research and study of narrative techniques, his poetic style; with a special focus on visual arts, from painting to cinema, from photography to theatre, lived with deep introspection.  Anarchist and visionary, painful and surreal, his works reflect on anxiety, crush conventions and illusions, proclaiming, with a barrage of words, that life is, by its nature, a scandal.  An unconventional path, funny and desperate, populated by staring puppets and strange creatures whose life unfolds between sarcasm and resentful emotion.