Lucio Giuliodori
Poems taken from "Surrealist Alchemy".
The poet
The leaden sky is where the poet lives.
He thinks he’s walking, but he’s taken flight.
He doesn’t know. He only stares far off.
He never glances down,
where matter dwells,
distorted sculptures
that compose “the real.”
Faded counterfeits
of Platonic ideas.
Brown, dark, inhuman,
These copies gash the white plume
of the poet’s body.
His spectacles peer
at a world on display,
more real than reality.
Down below, statues,
planetary zombies,
endure a whirlpool of torment
too rashly called “life.”
But he’s simply flying.
And laughing. He laughs with his body, laughs with his soul.
He laughs in a dream that he’s also directing
From the height of his Power. Pure, antique, ancestral.
Infinitely imposing. Tall as a giant.
His scepter? A helm,
Magic wand,
Flying carpet.
Keep soaring.
Go on existing
above what is “real.”
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Claude Verlinde
The Isle of the Dead
Towards the greatest of all Mysteries,
revealed and resolved in all its power.
At last we exist upright, vertically.
and the smell of death pervades every breath,
every hollow of this island that throbs like a heart.
And the sky and the sea
make one mirror, one regal frame
for freed karma.
In the presence of trees whose own language
is perfect and masterful.
And the stones that persist
beyond dreams of time
are still watching all who arrive
on this island whence no one depart.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Arnold Böcklin
Lusus serius
Life is a serious game
where what’s important is winning,
not playing.
Losers play.
Winners conquer
self-knowledge
by grace of their courage in understanding
that one plays to win.
Arise, o great warrior,
And do combat.
Your adversary is anyone,
even you,
transformed into the animal
that’s howling inside you.
In dream darkness
a new incarnation.
As life bursts forth
from the womb of what’s holy
thrashing and roaring
for future conquests,
musing and scrawling
symbols of power
intent on becoming
a living Victory.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Madeline Von Foerster
Museum of Broken Dreams
Who can say why
nonsense exists.
Insomnia.
Insanity.
Senseless reality appears to me constantly.
While I desire
nothing but nightmares.
and to offer my unconscious to total understanding.
Philanthropy’s questions denude every dream,
veiling sex.
Naïve nursery rhymes for a world gone deaf.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Mike Worral
Anfisbena
Good morning madness.
Good day.
I don’t trust you.
I prefer myself:
solitude,
vertigo,
time remembered inside me.
You, reality,
you don’t deserve the fullness
of all that I am
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Dino Valls
Insanity
Metaphysical vertigo,
ontological suspense
beclouded.
An aesthetic migraine,
oceanic exhaustion.
A steep cliff, headfirst tumble, trapped in being.
Whose abysses, bright children still call Psyche.
Angels dwell
within outward appearances.
Men see
nothing other than words.
While I sense a primordial pleasure:
Truth.
Ejaculated in a look.
Inspired by the painting "Insania" by Dino Valls
The Magic Library
True knowledge seeks through books.
But then transcends them. Thus not even they know if it really exists, or if it’s
playing at concealment, so secret and pervasive does its shape appear, shadowed by the veil of arcane powers, imprinted with the will of an ancestral vision.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Gianfilippo Usellini
Morning sun
A dream, reflected in what’s real, budding outside the window.
Reaching deeply inside me, an erotic search
for known contours, metaphysical, true.
I look from outside.
I look with my soul,
and with my vagina,
celebrating a rite
that makes the dream live.
I’m real, therefore I am. Art.
Find me in pleasure.
I’m facing Reality.
Inside of seeing.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Edward Hopper
Avant de s’endormir
To stretch out in your dream is not to sleep,
it is going beyond.
Into the elegance of mystery.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Leonor Fini
Poems taken from "Noumens".
A little temptation
How small we are, faced with temptation.
We should bow down before it,
as if it were a work of art.
Who knows if Schopenhauer saw the analogy…
How majestic the theatre that spreads open ahead.
While the larva hooded in reality
clings to the wind, like one of Ungaretti’s soldiers.
No recitations, this is another story. Another existence.
Flying towards…
into…
past veils that, ethereally,
caress the Dream’s
body.
Naked the path that covers up courage.
Heroine in a painting.
Mislaid in the real.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Shinji Asano
The Beginning of Time Y
With no beginning, time rains down
on a clear day,
The earth accuses, tweaks
the womb.
Somebody knocked.
A door is born:
to welcome beginnings,
the eternal return
of a rare moment.
Man was chosen:
he will endure it,
bear its invisible incomprehension,
a lifetime of fear.
He never will see it,
though he seek it eternally.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Giovanni Auriemma
The Witness
The Witness sees.
Himself a Vision, he envisions.
He knows what the paintings say.
Mute is the parcours that binds him to them.
For us precluded.
Cut off from the world.
Speaker of tongues known in the abyss.
He holds us in keeping, we must listen.
Burning with sounds, he looks at the paintings.
We have to listen.
A painter of thoughts.
We must hear him.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Samy Charnine
Lady of the Instant II
Halt the moment .
Don’t soar
beyond the scream: stay
explore outside
scattered within,
disparate
clinging
to the inevitability of the motionless flow.
And meanwhile Aristotle is rushing. To adorn it.
Carve a coat of arms for knowledge.
Time is sublime elegance.
Above thought.
Inspired by the homonymous painting by Michel Cheval