My flag

My flag has fading colours
frills bleached with time
and silly ventures
freed from enslaving poles
and ravaging invaders
claiming the infinite territories
unoccupied land
and annihilated colonies
unholy earth of mass graves,
wiping out walking dead men
and their following wives
pushing ugly offspring
always in a hurry
always attracted to some decrepit wall
or idolatrous directions.

My flag is clear
despite my colour blindness
its red carries all shades of human blood
the traces left in love and war
the pieces coming out of childbirth
and what remains after napalm 
the inappropriately pink and the sombre death crimson
the corporate expropriated colours
from radical realms rarely realised
rewritten graffiti
and second hand manifestos.

And there is whiteness
in fifty shades
the veiled and the exposed
the unsaid and the sensational
the smugness of whoreish virgins
the shyness of sluts
a pussy riot in corrupted cathedrals
delusional linen on beds of arranged marriages
on wedding night
orgasmic orgies mimicking the nativity
the allegedly sacred 
and the clearly desecrated
the fantastic never-ending torture of phosphorous
the void and the carte blanche
the tabula rasa and the frantic scribblings
on white boards and coffee-stained napkins
the smoke-roller's paper
the melancholic landscape of your skin.

You’ll see

On moving out of my family home forever

Everything packed
waiting to leave
like the last droplets of blood
of a decaying corpse.
Boxes of books read, reread or unread
clothes long out of fashion
thanks to time's contempt
folded chess boards
remnants of half-baked home work on rickety copy books
rickety vases
strong evidence of adolescence
traces of confusion -- Che Guevara and La Pietà are in the same box
hope and degeneration
uncared for silverware
the emotional labyrinth of photo albums.

I'd like to think they are ants hibernating
waiting to take life elsewhere 
when the spring sun will warm us again.
Will we survive, then, in a new skeleton?

Let’s be strangers

Let's be strangers
again
let's cross continents, war-torn countries
touch the famished, the infected, the downtrodden
walk through cyclones, floods, earthquakes
let's get lost on windswept islands
travel through cruel and merciful seasons
let's be strangers with false maps
and faulty compasses
crossing through landmined checkpoints,
haunted outposts, unsettled colonies
so that we can find each other again
behind the wall and its barbed wire
in the noisy city or in the deserted landscapes
in our little enclave or on some sprawling train
at the zoo watching seals play
so that we can retell each other
our stories of wonder
so that we can stand in awe of ourselves
rediscover ourselves wearing blindfolds
so that we can turn off the lights
embraced once again
as if love never happened
as if it's been secretly waiting
as if everything has yet to be said and done
and nothing mattered.

Bletchley Park

You entered my enclave

Domestic unrest

The butcher

Flight MH370

Refugee