I won’t submit!
I won’t submit!
I won’t submit!
And don’t you go
Call it an anaphora
And don’t you call it
A Eucharist offering from the Gods
Or a filiating elusive enigma
And don’t you go dissecting
My synecdoches, metonymies
alliterations or
scandalous enjambement
scrutinizing with your detective lens
for the quid that makes it not
prose dedicated to a rose
Consider it an entreaty
To never cross the thresholds
Of power or wear the laurels
Of Institutes or Embassies
An invitation to sneak
Between the folds of life proper
Elude deliberately constructed bare lives
And forked tongued Homo Sacer
Consider it a call to thread barefoot
Amid the unsanitized dust
Of the Mariupol theatre
Where no applause is forthcoming
From the palms of unsubscribing ghosts
And absorb in your farthest pores
All false hopes and terror until
All rhetoric is stilled and the bare bones
Exhumed and appropriately mourned
The slippage of the syllable
The slippage of the image
Is not Submissible
No UNESCO appointed Poetry Day
Can cleanse the daily poisoning
Of the 7-year-old Congolese miner
Small enough to fit in a tunnel
To feed our cell phones Coltan
As the spring of his youth has just begun
So, let’s not spill our syllables in vain
Let them unceremoniously be hurled
To halt the worldwide machine not to adorn
The dying world or cover up its stench.
Pina Piccolo, Imola May 20, 2023
the First Day of Spring
Cover image: The great Flood, fresco at the Santa Caterina di Alessandria Basilica in Galatina (lecce- italy)