By Maria Claudia Faverio

Clouds, not the ordinary moon,
manifest and lonely
in the dense scopes of dark,
clouds accompany the polymathic delirium
of this night.
Aggravated by the black vacuum
of the sky,
pallid perceptions of distances
crumble to blindness
like a tired eye,
and madness of colours
effaces itself
in the intricate evasions
of imagination.
The untuned reticences
of desire
transfix the ego
like a fake light,
enhancing its delirium,
while palaver of lips
discovers the sacred spaces
of silence.
Cautiously,
like old tune or voice,
the black load of fear
becomes tangible
in the capricious colours
of morning,
in the Phoenician sky
spreading over a reality
uncertain as faith.
There is a sense of panic
in the renewal of life.
The outrage of the years
is a swan song,
a remote surprise.

Emptiness

The night exhales its nimbus
like a limerick –
it pokes fun at me.
It unfolds into nothingness,
chaos of black and blue,
dump of clouds,
and solitudes that slink
through the virginal spaces
of the skull.
Words have drained
into these crippled images
like change
into a beggar’s hat,
helpless,
indifferent.

I am confused.
I don’t remember.
I don’t know what to say.
My soul is cramped on vacuity
like a supernova,
ignis fatuus
inebriated with silence.

It empties its solitude
into the black vault of the sky
and stares,
perched on the circumvolutions of anguish
like a sick owl.

Its sunken song
is louder than crash of thunder.
It unlocks the universe.

The Defeat of Desire

The epic of desire
has faded to a faint
utterance,
a confusion of syllables
unable to join
into trickery of words.
Speaking their parts
as in a trance of thought,
the personae of life
stand on the stage
and stare,
waiting for the grand finale
that doesn’t come.

They are tired.
They are not in search
of an author,
but of a prompter.
They don’t remember the words,
they don’t know why
they are dressed as Pierrots,
make-up blurred
by real tears
and sweats of life
and fiction
and life again.

But the prompter
doesn’t speak the word,
and they ramble on
like drunken sailors,
laughing at themselves
in the tacit hysteria
of despair.

And the grand finale doesn’t come.
Not even a shabby finale.
The perfection of the circle
is the consummation
of sufferance,
the consumption of hope.
The prompter is dead
as the personae.