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Domenico Cosentino, "Midnight Walker"

A collection of poems on alienation

By Patrizia PoliPublished 2 years ago 4 min read
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“If you think that poetry is expressing one’s thoughts, one’s vision of the world with grace, sweetness and refinement, don’t call those of Cosentino poems.” (quote from the website www.domenicocosentino.it)

In fact, I don’t. Can the good and the bad coexist in a single volume, I rather ask myself? Yes, and I give you a direct example, much more immediate than any explanation.

Collusion

I eat the canned tuna

Dicoop

directly into the metallic

box,

overlooking the balcony

with the wind that dries my

sweat

observing the overpass

where Moroccans go to

pissing at night

the leaves rot and become

yellow.

The windows of the municipal kindergarten

They all have broken glass

Like the spaces between the teeth

Of those old ones

Who made the war

And their eyes

They are still full of amazement.

Gipsy King

Gypsies wash their cunts

In the university toilets.

With the foot resting on the

Sink

And the long skirt to cover

The shame,

they tear off paper handkerchiefs

and if they pass them on the crack,

quickly.

As if they were doing

A handjob to their men.

At 8.30 in the morning,

with the taste of coffee still

in the mouth

I stop a retch,

just in time.

Out girls

With the pronounced “S”

squeak,

while the sun kisses

their tanned boobs

like smoked provola.

I broke my promise

Not to come anymore

At the university

And now I regret it.

All of this

For a

Cursed

shit.

Ok, what do you think is the best of these two poems that coexist in Domenico Cosentino’s “Midnightwalker”? Certainly the first. Why? But for the thousand subliminal reasons in which true poetry goes straight to the soul through intuitive shortcuts. The second, on the other hand, is ugly. There are no other words to define it, just ugly.

Here, Cosentino’s volume, which he defines as a “collection of bad poems” is a mixture — so fashionable nowadays — of prose and poetry, mini-stories without rhyme or reason, and lines interspersed with square brackets to mark the enjambements, but also of beautiful and ugly pieces, as if he were unable to distinguish, did not want to give up any notes taken, no gushed reflections, or, more subtly, he wanted to bare a soul made of contrasts, of poetry and vulgarity, of sublime and repellent .

The poems are discursive, the stories vaguely lyrical. Some prose texts reach the almost completeness of a novel, others are sketches, digressions, verses written side by side, simple utterances, as if the protagonist looks out of a hypothetical window and tells us what he sees and how he sees it, or, better, how he feels it, confessing his secret thoughts, his torments, often objectified in concrete things or in unnerved gestures, without even seeking help or solution, rather as a fact, an exhibition of paintings and states of precarious soul. Squalid hotel rooms, overpasses, background music, smoke, closed shutters.

The theme is the loneliness of a man who probably lives despite himself an immature life, including cigarettes, onanism, unrequited or finished loves, grief and family loss, remorse, wasted time. Hotel rooms for a few euros, lonely Sundays, sex as the opposite of communication, an unfulfilled gesture, the desire to touch without being able to do so that results in the consoling act of masturbating in a sink. The affections, the memories, the regrets, the remorse for the unspoken words (and they are the highest moments) are condensed into figures of family members who are no longer there or who are about to leave, the discovery of the disease exacerbates a loneliness even more experienced as extreme, unbridgeable. Those who are close do not understand and will never understand self-marginalization, inner discomfort, tortal alienation from the rest of the world.

“The boy has also become an adult. He brings with him the loneliness of those who suffer, because now he too is suffering damnably, every day at every hour. In the hospital ward or in his bed. When he pretends to smile, when he is with the others, but the others cannot understand him. Now the boy is a single adult. The loneliness of those who suffer. “

“Things are always understood later. When you have to face your misfortunes and your battles and understand that you are alone and that loneliness is really strength. But you understand this later. At the moment you just think about complaining and pitying yourself. “

Cosentino writes well, it is a fact. He should just have the guts to make the leap of quality, not to be satisfied with putting one’s feelings and illuminations on paper, but to build something more. In the piece entitled “That was love too” he almost succeeded.

fact or fiction
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About the Creator

Patrizia Poli

Patrizia Poli was born in Livorno in 1961. Writer of fiction and blogger, she published seven novels.

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