SMILE
You often
seem to smile
even when asleep,
light wrinkles on your
forehead, a barely audible
hiss from your nose. Your smile,
by night as by day, emanates not just
from your lips and gaze, but also from your
chin, cheeks and temples, from how your whole
body lies on the bed or moves around. It goes beyond
corporeity, is smoothly metaphysical, and metamental. Your
smile, and your letting me draw so heavily and freely from it, as if
you wished that I stored in me as much as possible of it, for me to smile at
you in turn, is the greatest gift I’ve ever received. It’s why I wake up every night
to stare at you, and I rest my eyes on you each time I can unseen, your smiling face being
all and only what I feel I have been always yearning for. My life’s wallpaper, and my sole world.
ONE MORE HALF CAMPARI SODA
It’s so muggy and unpleasant but
there’s time for sunshine to vanish.
Lying, between darkness and lines,
running short of gas, on the fringes
of wildness, waiting for my curber.
All the years behind don’t count a
minute, a minute ahead counts
who knows how many years.
The orange slice’s slowly
turning sour among
the rocks and so
is anything
that may
still be
lived.
Now
that
all
is
so sodden—
it’s so damn easy to say that I had
always known that but didn’t care.
MY LASAGNA’S READY
Before the last shaft
was intercepted
by the lowering bank
of murky nimbostrata
the color of pewter,
the pallid moorland
had already gone dark,
blurred in the distance,
all sounds had faded out
to unnatural silence,
and the sharp contour
of the imposing…
Well, my dear reader,
I beg you to finish this,
’cause the clock just rang
and my lasagna’s ready.
___
Copyright© 2020 by Alessio Zanelli. All Rights Reserved.
Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English and whose work has appeared in some 180 literary journals from 16 countries. His fifth original collection, titled “The Secret Of Archery”, was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information please visit https://www.alessiozanelli.it/.