Anni Luce (2020)
- The shadows around
- The light of what awaits us
- Heavenly bodies
- A thin line
- Love words
- Convalescence
- Replica
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
The natural alternation of the respiratory movement has broken, the first innate mechanism of the body, a symptom of life, has become forced, exhausting. Disoriented and scared, we got used to a new normality, we have lost the sight of the bad stuff, we have distanced ourselves from the cure. We agreed to survive, even at the cost of our own lives. We entrenched ourselves between walls and borders, believing that what we brought with us would always be enough.
But the rational calculation showed up to be incorrect and our fortress became a prison. We became suspicious of what we left out and, while our internal resources were getting thinner, we struggled more and more to tune with what was around us, which seemed distant, stranger, while our fear, our daily neurosis, were growing. We were light years away from where we thought we were, from what we hoped to become, our legs already gave up while the illusion to find a way out still animated us.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
Embrace the conflict, welcome the possibility of failure, vulnerability is our hope. Sacrifice a part of yourself to become part of the whole. Together we can tame the flames that consume us.
Together we can fire up a new life.
The shadows around
During the time that we let slide, between us, to stop this moment; the wait burned down every wish. The scars and the bruises we developed on our bodies are trenches in which we fight, war-worn, without finding a shelter. The light fills the room, slams our shadows on the walls; we are surrounded. I reach out my hand looking for you, I advance towards the heat because that is what you mean to me: the relief from the cold. Our house is on fire; the heat splits my lips, it splits my face. I abandon myself between your arms, among the rubble and the scattered remnants of what we believed we saved and we left behind instead.
The light of what awaits us
A choir of voices fills the air, thick with ash; broken down, overlapped, they cancel out each other in the din. And only silence remains. Only silence. At each awakening reborn and meet again. With the memory of days gone by, in the light of what awaits us. At each awakening reborn and meet again, in the light of what awaits us.
Heavenly bodies
Every drop of rain reflects the sun’s rays in its way: the colors only complete each other when they fall close to one another. We can be a storm or a warm, gentle wind, we can compose rainbows or overwhelm the world. If the conscience determines the direction, the action that follows the need is a revolution spark.
A thin line
It’s been years that I write everything obsessively but I easily forget what I’ve just written. I check my back while I’m walkin: I’m looking for something I would have lost, and I slowly lose myself. A thin line of ink ties under my skin, it has a beginning, but the other end gets lost in the skein, when it gets thicker. I put it where no one can see it, so I don’t have to give it a meaning: I will, when I’ll feel better. My time is now: in the past that becomes future. My time is now: in the present which is already past-future. My time is now: in the future left undecided. My time is now: now. Every time I think about all the time I’ve wasted bathing inside myself I drown… I drown. When the net around is firm it’s so easy to let yourself go, but in the long run you risk to get entangled in it. I believed too much in what they said about me to realize I wouldn’t last forever.
Love Worlds
Overwhelmed, submerged by the wave of time gone by, motionless, floating. The armies of the will and the immobilism clash on my helpless body. I feel the flames burning, they don’t animate me, they devour me. Once again I didn’t fail to succeed: I failed to try. The goal will always be unreachable if you won’t identify it. Write me letters full of love words.
Convalescence
[Instrumental]
Replica
I am the driver of a car, I didn’t choose it, I was born in it. The machine offers answers, so many of them that I ran out of questions: I am no longer able to formulate them, but not even to conceive them. And then the machine takes action: “What are you thinking about? I’m listening…”. I’m not thinking about anything, am I still able to think? I fill my chest with air. I fill it again, faster and faster. I try to focus on something to calm down, to distract myself, but the car calls me back to drive. I’m the autopilot of a car, the car is my driver. I’m in the back seat of a car, the street is clear, the light is annoying for the sight, I ask the driver where we are headed, he replies that I decide it, and while I look at him I realize it’s me: I’m the driver, he is me. Sitting aside with the phone in my hands, from the ajar door I see her long legs. For a moment I realize that she is waiting for me lying on the bed, then a slight vibration shakes me, the threshold tightens, I lose the contact. When I look up again, I’m somewhere else and she is elsewhere too. I probably saw her walking away, but I have only a fuzzy memory of that moment. Trying to shelter myself from unhappiness forever, I gave up feeling something once and for all, blocking any possibility of being happy, preventing myself from being happy.
Origami (2020)
- The lesser evil
- Contagion
- Come back to me
- Mediterranean
- The road home
- Come Origami
The lesser evil
I’m trying to learn to take care of myself
But I can’t even be alone for a moment anymore
I always line up the same gestures to which I can give an order but not a meaning
I speak alone, I walk fast, I chew the nerves that should hold me
I improvise worn expressions, to persuade myself that I still have control over me
I’m looking for a pattern, I’m chasing something constant to hold on to
I draw a drawing, I crave a meaning, I see myself reflected
And in every season, I always walk the same avenue
I watch the leaves fall and be born again while
I hold tight what little remains in my hands
I squeeze so hard that I forget why
If at every step
I keep choosing the lesser evil
The bigger the gap
Between who I am and who I could be
“The lesser evil” is a reflection on becoming adults, on responsibilities, on the fear of not knowing how to manage them and the toxic effects this has on mood, stability, well-being, perception of Self.
Contagion
Words deprived of their meaning
like sharp weapons
To trace the outline of a shape that lacks substance
Of an identity
Defined by difference from what is different
But it’s just fear
To be wasted ourselves
Who are we really if nobody looks at us?
We lose our milk teeth and delude ourselves about biting stronger
We are only more alone, trapped in a hatred that knows no reason
Without the courage to look down
we point our feet to give us momentum,
for fear of seeing our future in others
Those eyes are nothing else
than a mirror in which we are besieged
by our comfort, ephemeral embankment
If contempt never made anything valuable,
the fear of contagion makes it more palatable
“Contagio” is about the feeling of anthropological and cultural superiority that pervades many “well-educated” people when they face those they would call “ignorant”. The anger and the violence they express comes from the same place as the hate that some of those who they define as “ignorant” have for immigrants: it is the fear of becoming like the one they hate, to lose their privilege.
Come back to me
The human need to make sense of what has been lost, of what changed over time,
It is an unavoidable trap
I don’t want to turn around
I’m afraid you may not be there anymore
But I can’t look at you
In my eyes, a blade of truth
Sharpened in the days spent alone
Nervously rereading the story that brought us here
I curse every step, but when I think it could have been different,
I deceive myself too
Every moment was the perfect fruit of our being
Do you remember when, lying on the grass, we walked in the sky?
We were left without legs
To keep us on our feet
Arms too weak and tired
To hold us still
I’m still here
hug me
I’m still here
Come back to me
“Come back to me” is a song about love that ends. Much more trivially and dramatically than how one can learn from fiction (literature, cinema, television), which very often constitutes the only source of sentimental education, love can end without trauma, simply because the two people involved no longer share that feeling. In the absence of a clean break, everything is nuanced and difficult to understand and elaborate, to overcome.
Mediterranean
Dragged by inertia, we live
the same death every day
habit dries up the soul
Non-sentient spectators of a tragedy that
becomes normality
Our body does not float, it sinks
We wish to fill the ocean
but to do it without getting wet
standing still on the shore
waiting for the water
to return the bodies
to celebrate our immense pain
Laid down in the horrible theater
Of opinions expressed only to make an audience
Addicted to the story of hatred
We listen with our stomachs
Afraid of what we ignore
Comforted by simplifying
Unable to reach out
Dry even under the skin
Lost in the middle of the storm
we cling to what’s left
Of fragile boats
We prepared for our lives
Made of weak certainties
Pale values to deny,
We pray we’ll never have
To face the sea
Put to flight
From the worst war
attacked
From our conscience
Apathy feels like
A safe harbor
Is our life just survival?
We have asked ourselves several times what we will tell our children about these years when the death of human beings at sea is daily news: we are afraid to find ourselves answering the question “why did you do nothing?”, “where were you?”. “Mediterraneo” is about the anger and the shame of living here, on the shore, to be safe and dry while seeing so many deaths that you become numb, losing our humanity.
The road home
I wrote a book
with the words you said
without neglecting any
With care
To define a common language
Our way home
But these pages
are not big enough
And even if I try to write everything
what is missing prevails
I entrust my gaze to the void
I know it is the only place to
escape your blinding brilliance
If I close my eyes
I can see you
immediate, without misunderstanding
Suspension of contact
Defines my need to have you by my side
Sometimes I wish I had framed the right words with an arrow over time
but I didn’t have the courage to speak,
I didn’t have the courage to make myself understood
“La strada di casa” is a love song, intended as a daily commitment to understanding and intertwining the needs of the other with one’s own, at the service of a common project. A path not without difficulties, but guided by the unique value that is seen in the other person.
Like origami
My number:
an origami crane made of thin paper
That stands out in the sky
from the windows of my room
Unsuitable for flight,
it observes the birds, the flocks, the routes,
deluding itself
not to be alone anymore one day
Constantly looking for a friendly look
I put my best steps in sequence
But I wander aimlessly, my goal is not a place
I just want to know how to meet you again
If it never started
it will never end
“Come origami” tells of loneliness and the absence of love, the idealization of this feeling.
Fear of making it (2018)
- At dawn of every night
- Vertigo
- At least your gaze
- Fear of making it
At dawn of every night
Open eyes stare at the darkness
The thousand shapes of the suffocating cell of my thoughts
The breath becomes short and tiring Frigid nerves in tension seem to give way I see myself lying on the abyss then carried deep down
As I slowly wither, the inert body no longer reacts
At every attempt to rise up I feel a force that pushes me down
I look for a hold in the glows to find the clarity I get up dripping with sweat, still staggering in the darkness
If daytime is the space in which reality draws and feeds our inquietudes, the nighttime is when it’s harder to face them: not because they become more awful, but rather because we remain alone with them, locked in a cage from wich it’s impossible to break out. Our body.
Vertigo
I walk on my rope, stretched like an acrobat,
I do not want to fall but I know it will happen
My sentence is not the void under my feet but what the shoulders holds:
the weight of every question
The temples begin to pulsate the vertigo makes me teeter,
the empty lungs are about to collapse
Vulnerable, prey to myself, I look for a hold, without finding it, I lose balance,
I fall into the void
I fall, but the fall ends perpetually on another rope: life is a closed circuit
If my destiny is to fall, I will open my eyes to enjoy the view
The inquietudes that devour us at night originate from everyday experience, characterized by an increasing tension, which is shaped by the pursuit of an equilibrium that we know is going to be brittle. Stability, hardly sought and rarely achieved, is inevitably fleeting, prelude to the fal that restores precariousness and imposes the pursuit of a new equilibrium. There’s nothing left but an image, the view offered by the void opened under out feet.
At least your gaze
I gave time to time and time has taken us everything while we waited
for everything to get better
I believed in our time, in a future improvement of what once seemed perfect
Then you realize that not everything is combinable,
no matter how hard you try
Your perception deforms the things you have around, calls them by name
Too much attention to the other’s faults hides the common dream from sight
Until you are buried by a thousand questions without an answer
I cannot stay here suspended in the void
I need us to recognize each other, at least your gaze
What meaning can be given to failure?
Each of us a unique creature: that’s why it is so hard to deal with other people. Even when one thinks to have found someone similar to himself, in the end the differences seem to prevail over simple mutual interests. One finds himself bewildered by what was once considered a sheltered space, oppressed by an intolerable weight. Destroy what it has been built, givin it to incompatibility, seems to be the more reasonable choice but getting rid of the others doesn’t mean we get rid of ourselves, of our flaws, wich can be solved solely through the relationship with the others.
Fear of making it
Climbing on the rocks of our August
To find ourselves still chosen despite ourselves
Building castles of sand, mud of
Desires repressed for fear of making it
I have no more resources to float
I lost them at the bottom of the sea
Intent to follow in the deep footsteps that we left behind
following again those sure furrows we will collapse
We live a daily life of entrenched routines, scripted behaviors that help us feeling good about the others and ourselves, and facing reality. We rely on them so much that we don’t realize that everything around us quickly changes and reassuring automatisms don’t always help us, they rather worsen our condition. The fear of making it is the self-induced paralysis we use to avoid facing our limits and our inadequancy, it is that script to which we often assign our responses