Marco Di Caprio

A house wrapped in darkness. I wander its corridors. Cool air brushes a livid room of gray humors, molding among fungi. Pollen-light hangs in the air, a suspended frequency. Rhodopsin trembles within the capital sentence of my sorrowful dialectic.

What are you to me, my dear grandfather K.? Are you the room where I lay in the sweetness of sad dreams? The chamber of my frenzy, immersed in a psychedelic tremor? Or the dark room that resounds with scornful dissonance? My dwelling is a tangle of compulsive colors, reinforcing the dialectic of my sorrowful spirit.

An icy moon cuts through the living room where we once lay in the illusion of happiness. Grandfather, believe me, I would take refuge in your arms, yet tonight I feel so alone that I am almost in the company of nothingness. I search for a room to escape the thousand specters of solitude that pursue me and ask for comfort. Lightning blinds my delirium, trembling in a syncopated vibration within my weeping mind.

Where is my Muse? She is gone. She no longer speaks, no longer opens her laments to me. The new poet, an American magnate, seduced her with gifts, then bound, tortured, and sold her. Beautiful poems? Buy beautiful poems. He forced her into a uniform, exhausted song, a sterile stereophony within cacophony. Her voice faded into shrill decline, until it fell silent. And yet, I still love her, still think of her broken vibration.

How faint my voice is before that vision, now fading in the recesses of my mind. Now that you are mute, my bleeding Muse, what is left to say? I leave, prisoner of love, prisoner of frenzy, tearing words apart as they move toward the passion of my delirium.

I have nothing to offer, only suffering. My song recalls your last words, wrapped in metallic shrieks that degrade poetry into a long oblivion. Colors invert, strike blurred images sharp enough to wake me from life’s nightmare.

Grandfather, speak to me. Where are you? A sign, a voice. Pain crystallizes into shrill cries that dissolve into silence. That silence was your suffocated request for dialogue. Your eyes, so like mine, became a mirror in which I lost myself.

“M., what is it?”

“I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“Do not sink,” you answered. “Life flows like a torrent. Stay and listen to true beauty.”

“I am trapped in a night that never ends.”

“We all are. But we must fight. Listen to Nature. Only it can soothe these dark times. Do not flee from yourself. Fight within the pulse of life.”

“My will is weak. How can I defeat the spirit of the age?”

“Do not seek outside yourself. Look within. Do not renounce beauty. Do not let the spirit of the age corrupt it. Do not fragment your mind. Do not lose yourself in commerce and empty speculation. I have lived, and I lived by listening to Nature. Remember: do not become subject to any totem that kills your instincts.”

“How can I go on, now that you are fading?”

“There is no farewell. Live.”

After you died, the forest still sang in your memory. Now I wander through time, knowing your face will not be there, yet still hoping to find you waiting.

I tried to free myself from patriarchal authority, the totem of my castration. Yet I cannot deny my origins, nor the beauty of art and music that still resonates through time. To deny them would be to deny myself.

Now I want a pill, and another. Paroxetine, nicotine, benzodiazepines. I want more. I want to color the illusion that colors exist.

Everything dissolves: numbers, notes, images, neurotransmitters. A world reduced, fragmented, commodified. A heart whose node no longer pulses.

Another pill. I turn my prayers toward Helicon. Perhaps the afterlife is too full of light, too much joy for my nature. And yet I see a rose, the rose of lyric poetry, opening into a final melody.

A forgotten dream sinks beneath the ocean, a submerged city in the night.

O sweet Muse with Asian eyes, remain with me. Sing the last sound, beyond words, in my final passing.