Freddie's Corner

FREDDIE'S CORNER

Their lives, my life

The poetry of images (photo by Leni Frau)

03-11-2023 by Freddie del Curatolo

Every morning I look out of the shack and watch their lives.
They are one with the mud, the sheet metal, the wood.
They are broken beams like their bones, but they hold up and can be stronger than any misfortune.
They can raise children, care for the old, support the crippled.
Rotten beams as our thoughts sometimes are, unstable on that infamous soil in which, however, sooner or later, a flower always sprouts, like a liberating smile.
They are hard and sharp stones, crumbled gravel, sand from hinted constructions, bricks stolen who knows where.
They coexist and you often find them together to make house, roof, floor.
Their existences laugh and wonder at nothing because it would be too easy to complain about everything.
They have ears trained to the sirens, the screams of merchants, the cries of infants, the coughs of old men, the squeals of children, the barking of dogs and the squeaking of rats.
They vomit rubbish, spit toxic liquids, shit open sewers.
There are big, wide-open eyes in place of windows, and often it is the heart that serves as their door, creaking and bumpy.
They embrace for a birth and a death, they kill each other for a penny or a beer.
They haggle, barter, get drunk, disappear and return as if nothing had been.
And nothing has been, after sunset.
Nothing will be, if one can wake up again.
Every morning I look out of the shack and watch their lives.
My life.

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