Dom Gabrielli- (II)

night nostalgias

where in the night you roam, in the same attic where the professor impressed the scientific world with slideshows and wit, with theses and smiles, you hold the keys and you melt them on the funeral pyre where you placed yourself once, every particle of self burning, fumes of leaving

each word carried is an element of beginning but as we know you can begin anywhere. there are no rules even if good taste would be better. shades must be shades in these shadow lands where Ancient Greeks carved up the sacrificed limb of beauty, offering blood for water, muscle for hope, on the side of a sloping quarry

rules must be instinct driven. there is nothing to be applied. theory is dead. so you learn and you learn til the words become blood, become the blood which begins which begets which draws from the earth its iron redness

it was a long parchment, the same ones the professor used for his explanations, for his theorems and experiments. you tore one off. it was late. you were smoking furiously in the cellar. the wine bottles were dancing. you had a girlfriend, a poetess, you ravished her in the dank bat-infested alcoves

those were the days of the anxiety of influence, deconstruction ruled. the poetess quizzed your pen, she dismantled your bravura. you slapped wickedness on the walls. you wrote directly there, where she could not read the codes. you wore your body as a joke. you undressed her prudery, her skirts dried in the black sun

there was no punctuation, the lines were a meter long. the black pen and the black voice, the pyre, the pyre of night the pyre of your legs dancing in between the arrogant vagina's cerebral craving

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.