Just a Passing Thought
Watch me transform a memory.
It starts from the lining of my insides (lilac silk)
And steam-engines through the grey matter of my brain –
Did you ever doubt that you’d find me here
On these pages
Scripted as if out of your
Hallucinatory dream. I might feel like
Vegas as a ghost-town, afterhours
On the strangely vacant NYC streets,
One last cigarette on the rooftop before dawn
An empty, blue plastic bus
sighing through its morning local stops on a blindingly sunny Tuesday.
I know you searched for me elsewhere
The alchemy of your grandiose dream of me
into my grandiose being even more elusive
than the morning coffee you
sometimes forget whether you drank, or not.
I know you wanted a spectacle
With sparklers, big musical feelings, my hair, eyes and legs
Like you remember them, and maybe even
Hearts bursting confetti, and smiles.
Like the train whistle blowing, somewhere out there
while you’re in a four-walled room of comforts
I kept moving. Grey matter and lilac silk
Flowing like a river.
I wasn’t afraid to change although
I was afraid.
Aren’t we all a little bit afraid, and longing
When the sky first colors
In leaving last night behind
And with it, all of your life before it.
Aren’t we all a little bit nostalgic. But
can you find the euphoria, my friend,
In starting again, clean
Maybe naked. Maybe on a balcony, or in four familiar walls, or set on a train moving toward
Something. Tomorrows hold cans of paint for our insides.
The infinite hues of you and of me somewhere
Never together, but maybe always.
Did you ever doubt that you’d find yourself here
On these pages
Traces of you in my coffee,
Ribbons of your colors dipping
In and out of the grey matter of my brain.
Valentina is a lifelong storyteller and poet who has always tried to convey the mixture of rawness and honesty with a sense of Magic Realism in her musings. She has moved from her homeland in Italy to America and traveled extensively while studying and living intensely, all the facets of what “Woman” can mean.”
