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CHRONOS
Barefoot boy ascending a steep staircase.
Falling on a Timex watch.
Crushing Alpha and Omega.
A watch finger pricking his heel.
Speckled blood on carpet and stair rod.
Mother consoling her son. Unmeasured time.
Father revealed as the un-protector.
Horology his compulsive
and easier love child.
An irascible man plucked out time's arrow.
Three days he hunted for the lost part.
Filthy room, inner sanctum, top of the stairs.
Dirty table, dirty rags for oil stained objects.
Clocks. Watches. Time uncovered, anatomically exposed.
Naked hair and main spring shielded by a face.
Each dial containing a hurrying short story.
Nine fifteen. Four thirty. Twenty four after death.
Mother kissing a removable plaster.
Child's skin throbbing with expectation.
They look up at a vast closed door,
slowly approach and knock hard.
Chronos, once a white horse on the sun
god's chariot of time, has been mutated
to an ordinary guy who removes his eye glass,
turns and listens.
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LA STRADA FINI
I ate pistachios from an ashen grey tree
in Bronte at the base of Mount Etna.
Sharpened volcanic pellets hanging wild
and warm on their knotted branches.
Full of seedy unripeness,
making biscuits or ice cream
perfectly dammed.
I threw them onto the narrowing road.
Picked up my camera,
adjusted its hungering lens.
A woman dressed in forlorn blue
with her old, gnarled, half naked father
were seated (like lovers) on a broken bench.
La strada fini! she cried, hand plucking.
She offered pistachios, born of her property,
then withdrew, arm in arm, with the old nakedness.
Obediently I tasted her offering.
Compensation, or simply poison,
for daring to photograph a distant friend
and neighbour, that higher up
indifferent lava?
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