Mario Badino

The building is wide and tall
and tension crawls along.
 
Discarded objects
lay all around, neglected,
 
hitting my eyes and thoughts
as if forgotten ages.
 
I go – a moving walkway
leads me forward, unwilling.
 
I walk through the dark cellars,
a long, underground corridor.
 
Dozens of doors are waiting:
they sleep as I go by.
 
I expect the abandoned ones,
the lost people of my life,
 
to jump out of a room
as if we’d never lost sight,
 
to show up for a while
for a greeting or chatter.
 
Suddenly everything is crowded:
I’m there, in an old theater,
 
sitting comfortably desperate,
next to a once-cherished face
 
that faded a longtime ago.

Copyright 2024 by Mario Badino

Mario Badino lives in Italy, where he teaches Italian in middle school. He is the author of three books of poetry (“Cianfrusaglia”, “Barricate!” and “Santificare le feste”) and he’s a member of the poetic collective SlammalS, that promotes spoken-word poetry in Southern Italy. The first poems he’s not ashamed of date back to 2000, and were part of the art installation “Stanze per un improbabile paesaggio”, created together with the photographer Paolo Rey. You can read more about him on his web site cianfrusaglia.wordpress.com.

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