A collaboration with Andy Jackson.
Andy is an award-winning poet and editor, and is author of three poetry collections including A Beginner’s Guide To Cheating and The Saints Are Coming.
On special offer for one week only:
buy seven days, get seven nights.
The future will soon be back in stock,
in various colours, most of them bright.
Today we sold the last of the dark.
Tomorrow we start selling the light.
Two’s company. Three is civil unrest.
We have proof. We have figures.
Stay calm. Do not attempt to run.
Papers must be shown on request,
and if you cannot feel the trigger
perhaps it is we who hold the gun.
This is a matter of liberty:
The space you protect is yours,
the space you fill is mine.
This is a matter of property:
The face you show is yours,
the face I steal is mine.
This is a matter of secrecy:
What you conceal is yours,
what you reveal is mine.
I spent my life looking
for a way up, lurking
in damp lobbies, daring
myself to climb, fearing
footsteps, the echoing
voices of those going
in faith, each landing
a beginning, an ending.
I slept for sixteen hours, awoke,
waited for my eyes to readjust
to the night, blissfully deceived
by promises of music and smoke.
What does the night see in us
that the day can take or leave?
I gave my sanity to build a Babel,
one girder, one storey at a time,
knowing the first slip could be fatal,
seeing the sky in instalments while
some grasped the point of it all:
not the topping out, but the climb.
I am posted missing from this town,
between hinterland and overspill,
where dusk refuses to come down
and daybreak is an act of will.
On desiccated evenings,
stripped to the bone by cold,
the world is reduced to two
dimensions: inside/outside.
Everything feels high-rise
if you are lying in the road,
and looking up is all you can do,
to skies without ceilings.
It is said when man stares into the abyss
the abyss stares back at him. In all this
greyscale between these polar extremes,
nothing in the looking is what it seems.
I had to force myself to stare again today:
the abyss just sighed, and looked away.
He shall walk on water,
though his feet will get wet.
He shall strike some matches
to bring forth the fire.
He shall roll away the rubble,
be raised from the bed.
Ye shall know by these signs
our little Messiahs.
The street does not know
the feet that wear it down,
nor the purposes of flow.
I’ve seen people drown
In the overflowing drains
and gutters of this town
with its unfollowable signs.
Don’t stop for anyone. Go
placidly, against the grain.
English 
Italian 