The Mafia in Sicily
There is a leaden oyster-coloured stone. It is a
man's soul.
The giant holds the stone like a pearl balanced
between heaven and hell.
The stone is an unwell son, or a sun over Sicily,
or a poor
man's soul. It can be whatever the giant wills it
to be.
The soul he holds should be a symbol asleep under
the giant's thumb.
In the nightmare of nature there is a barren land,
Sicily.
Among the poor available sons who trembling await
the giant's second coming
is one who is not the sort death approves, on of
flesh as well as stone,
one heavy in my heart with heavy past loves - Sicily,
the canvas of my close
family; a carcass slung under my liberty (I who
have been asleep with giants
under the sides of their eternal quarrel would need
diptheria
and poisoned water to hold the giant's tribe in throe.
Infamous figures
they possess the Sicilian earth). The giant is
paymaster to defeat
under the enrapturing poppy, a paradoxical prophet
of stone atrocities
in a stony land of deep poverty; he belongs to the
special torments,
this obese giant among the giants, unbending, quick,
yet piscine
and roughly as pliable as molten metal or the metal
stones.
All the poor available sons belong to the giant above
The soul is squamous where the giant holds it above
my wrath
Useless, soiled. He puts it down. The giant holds
the other sun up
in his webbed fingers like a blind stone. The stones
of Sicily are blind.
Like me they've lost the light of the sun. Under
water, blind to the light,
they've never begun. All that the giant despises we
once nearly possessed
and loved, except the few who lie in the lush
apocrypha
within the giant's colossal caves, black, fortunate,
truly lowly
but not penurious. They are unworthy, asleep under
the sensual giant
For the giant hates as he loves, furiously, and these
are not giants.
But they are happy splashing about amongst the blood
pools inside the caves,
happy as a slave is to evil, no longer dissembling
or afraid under a marathon
calf slung carelessly where many confused Gullivers
once travelled,
over the land of Sicily, under her seas, over these
obscene dwarves.
in black suits. I watch them come, the gaint's
crustaceans, out of the caves
and up the hill into our valley. The placentas
weigh heavy, so why
do they come? They come to play in the valley.
The valley seems lush.
the valley is barren so they go, womb-weary.
Back in myopia against
the massive breast of the giant, this false god, blind
to the light
of the sun, aborted foetuses they sleep peacefully
counting bodies not sheep
nor fish. Blind to the light of the sun where the
giant shall being to create
more dwarves out of the fishes and symbols, they who
have never begun
have lost Christ's light, the light of the sun. They
too are the poor available
sons with the pitted teeth of australopithecus.
Many men died on those teeth
which drip blood onto the great thigh of the giant
of Sicily.
For centuries blood has stained this water, flesh
pitted these teeth.
I searched desperately for diptheria. I was a giant.
