Dom Gabrielli (Italy) | Real Stories Gallery

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh University and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. In Paris, Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He translated widely including published works by Bataille, Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing, whilst pursuing various business ventures. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man, his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body, which earned considerable praise.Both books were published by Ziggurat Books International. Gabrielli currently travels extensively.

++Copyright remains with the author & publisher

becoming centaur, becoming pyre

(copyright Dom Gabrielle 2010)

(for lakshmi shankar)

nights are too cold to be alone

in these vast fields of emptiness

there have been many crows today

feeding on the carcasses of dead rats

i have been munching the long straw shoots of fennel

and the small black bitterness of wild olive

i abhor this breed of scavenger

whose instinctual laziness

makes light of rotting prejudice

i never judge but i leave indifference in my jaw

the black sands glistening one last time

the sun sets facing me

the sea is motionless

barely a wave disturbs my voice as i sing

black sands of sorrow

build a pyre with my bones lover

the warriors from over the hill they came

stole all my children

they said i was a beast lover

they told me i couldn't lie with you

so build me a pyre build it high build it strong

throw good kindle upon the heap

set me free this horse in me set me free

they know nothing of gods nothing of love

nothing of love nothing of god nothing of desire

they eat each other with scorn and ire

come build me my pyre my final desire

black sands of sorrow black sands of trouble

build a pyre with my bones lover

build me a pyre

a pyre build me one build me one

a pyre build me a pyre a pyre

for these tired bones of desire

(120 days...)

(copyright Dom Gabrielle 2010)

they stripped you to the core

to the bloodless blood of words

the names they tried to pin on your estranged ego

undone in a clinic for the delirious

the only names you know are lofted high

they are events and scenes and panoramiques

kids you say

with stories to share

with you as one of the actors

escaping from a hideous world

which was never worth living

a film of the outside

a free zone

where the mafia hunt

the inviting anus of the adolescent

love burnt in their narcotic revolvers

just as they'd sound out a vein

with a suspect needle

the film has no actors

because life is already full of those

the real people fled long ago

when words were banned to the confines

and my heart still pulsated with the living

film died with Pier Paolo

on a Roman rubbish tip

with the detritus of the outside people

where the poetry of life itself had once stood proud

the centaur

of everywhere a god gone wounded screaming

his knee caps hacked

crippled before they brought him down

poetry didn't rally

fascism of a new kind permeates

words dead

in the face of bigotry and shame

insult-words begging the scrotum of opinion

the finally victorious hand bag of the eternally foul mother

drooling God from the sweet tea of her wrath

words dying

where insults have to fly

to the absolute limit where breathing-words

from the land of the peyotl eaters

write still in strange dialects

where sounds reverberate in sunsets orange

and thought from the depth of unthinking

sings still

this is where we sing and read and write

all of us now

in this unknown moment

of banished future

they will live to regret their terror yet

from his cell

the eternal marquis writes

his obdurate masturbations

are systematically destroyed

burning with his evil tears in a bonfire of silhouettes

dancing heathens have won

the decapitated sung under torture

the film goes on

censored

the original 120 days

animus of rejection

hindered

plundered

murdered

(living)

thirst and the sea

(copyright 'the parallel body' 2010)

you lost her

in your arms

her final heartbeat

was yours

you turned to the desert

not the sea

your poem

began that day

your parched throat was hers

in a sea without water

your thirst for her

for her hand

for her lips

for her bosom

waves in your verse singing

for her who was still you

in the desert alone

you would always be together

you called her back

line after line

you begged

the wounded earth in labour

to bring her back

your voice

calling to the elements

calling each tear with a new name

all names were hers

your voice

hers to call

to unite with the desert thirst

and live on in song

The Time Sculptor (re-opened)

(copyright: from the eyes of a man, 2009)

I was lonely. Sitting down with empty pads, writing what I assumed were ideas, sculpting the contours of something, which resembled the outline of a thought, abstract shapes and black lines of suppositions. I didn’t ask anyone if I was right or wrong. I didn’t care. I was so profoundly alone I made friends with books. I cancelled dream and hope. I lived in a domain some people liked to call nothingness, but it was mine. It was my web and I was spider.

I imagined an impossible space, a space-less circle, in which my mind wandered and I spoke to myself on the wings of a secret music.

I wondered if it was space at all. My main preoccupation was time or how to annul it. I was a negativity trying to negate another. It was unequal combat but I felt strong. My Nietzschean vocation wholly intact, I hoped by ridding myself of inherited co-ordinates to surreptitiously creep away from physicality into a form of forgetting, a land of molten memories, a land of pure time, from peak to peak.

All my thoughts focussed on destroying memory as I aimed to take Time back into the marrow of nothingness through a breach in thinking. I wanted to make myself infinitely small and crawl through this hole painstakingly punctured in the membranes of time itself. The gamble could only be achieved of course if I myself became nothing, so slight as to be invisible. I could not personally get in the way of my experiment. I had to be absent a priori.

I sought out ditches, caverns, dimly lit grottoes where a terrifying obscurity heralded an infinite optimism and a beautiful forgetting. I was on a journey through darkness to the other side of the night, to the humble acceptance of a new dawn as nothing. Here, I whispered to myself: there is blindness in seeing so let us close our eyes. There is too much noise, too much useless music so let us create silence. I shall sculpt nothingness. Non-time will dance through my fingers. This is my obstinate objective, my aim and my hope. I call it freedom, although you could say that I am trapped in paradox. I know that the words I use are inadequate to express this venture, but there are no others. I will follow the poet and pray the non-religious prayer: Accept paradox and the sky’s thundering. Yes, I am getting there.

Instinct guided all my movements. Improvisation was everything. My words had to be bled of moments. I forced myself to write only in states of fullness or total emptiness. Nothing in between. Events spoke through me and I simultaneously freed myself of what I never could become in fact.

There is euphoria in the renting open of time. There is a hilarious passage through, out and into an outside world of wonders. Something like paradise in this hell, something like a vision after a season in hell. Our eyes can’t believe what they see because believing always comes after; hence we can truly write what we see without seeing it. We can laugh without scorn and hatred. So it is with these movements of thought, which come as they are written. O patience and song! O navigation in rivers undone!

The time sculptor is here again. He left and came back. He withdrew into the sea to live with the colour green, where the scorching Mediterranean sun is his friend, he said:

Be patient, sometimes we need to begin at the end before discovering the middle without beginning or end. Keep moving, these pages are infinite.

The Time Sculptor counts grains of sand in dunes of night. He is an undoing and a running. He is a pool of infinity. Non-time can be written.

Mother

(copyright: from eyes of a man, 2009)

Born of love,

I was born of love,

of a love loved.

I was born of being loved,

with love-words

pronounced over me,

with your eyes

fixed upon me,

with the hurt I had already

inflicted upon you.

Born into love

into the ocean of love,

cleansed of deadly knowledge.

Born of your loves loved,

I felt your eyes dim

and fall away into dusk.

I never heard a scream

nor a cough,

never saw a tear fall

nor your head sway

with inner fear.

I was love, my name love.

You look at me

with love.

You look at my words now

with love,

wondering how

I managed to

escape you,

how love could have

escaped love.

Last Comment

When we’re in pain, to whom can we stretch out a hand? Who’s still there to hold us in the split-second that precedes the fall? Who can anticipate it is at that moment we shall keel over? At that moment we must run to help? And when you’re all alone, you can speak out loud and hope and wager someone out there’s going to hear. Humans close off their ears to suffering. God? God in his absence. We’re alone, Professore, we’re alone.

The Sacrifice is done. At the end of transcendence, at the end of the possibility of better worlds? Why? What sacrifice? For the work! As a good writer said: the body becoming book, or becoming painting, it’s the same thing. Leaving the biological body for something different which is definitively non-biological. That’s what they can’t understand at all. A question of sensations. And our way of leaving biology is our particular style, if we’re good enough to have one. The will is a stain left on the page by our passing bodies. The poet’s honest food is tears. He senses the tug of something eternal linked to the music of another time. An image can conjure up this temporality. A good writer must live there. I am not what you see. My fingers write burnt by the third degree.

Il Professore died this morning. Of all folk I know and knew, he was probably the one who most helped me down this way of words. He took the jump. His suffering too great, he decided it was time for death to take him. He killed himself. He decided to stop eating. He had just enough strength to pull his wheelchair to the window. The wind and all his words and all his ideas tumbling to the ground. My Professore’s eyes closed on this life with mine regurgitating their centuries of grief. You suffered the physical consequences of bad luck. And now my eyes are stinging in retreat. There is no point speaking to me. My grief cannot be heard. My eyes communicate with dark soils. I plunge my hands down and dig at the crust. I roll about and clutch my ankles. I lie on my back and cross my legs. I outstretch my arms and press the palms up. Just as they carry you away for good now. Just as they banish your handsome face forever, closed in a wooden box. As if your memory could find a box big enough.

And now they have dug a grave for you, a cold hole in the mud. And they put a stone cave above your neck. Just like the others. Just like the others that got carried away too. The eighteen year old villager hit by a car, the mechanic with cancer, the 93 year old granny. Their bodies lined up under the earth, waiting for impossible affection. Just like the others, you lie in your best suit and tie. Your sun tanned face smiling at the closed vents of blackness. And whenever the passion plays, I shall seek out a landscape for my eyes to sit and weep and think of you. Why don’t they feel this passion? How can they laugh and mock so easily? It is the collusive mob which you depicted so well, their sinister weakness and their eyelashes clogged up in the blood they sheepishly spill. I’ll sit at the memorial and sing the optimism of eternal life which you had obtained long before you died. I can feel your cold stony hand closed around mine forever.

How do you expect me now to believe in this body, this time, this space? When we cannot tolerate being pinned down to any single spot? We are everywhere already as we come. Just as we move through the folds of memory, as fluid timeless bodies. I leave utopia. Everything I say is practical and proven by fact. I am an empiricist, a rogue to the State. Yet, we are talking of the Spirit now. What would become of us? What of our worldly memories? Of our minds? And this faith in another life? An afterlife? St. Augustin imagined himself in the company of angels, marvelling at images of a perfectly peaceful bliss. St Francis of Assissi had the certainty of an afterlife. Paradisewas a just accomplishment for those who had followed the Christian way. What gave them such faith? How could they be so sure? What disturbing meditations lay in ambush for those who could not allow themselves such blind faith? What sounds, what words formed of sounds scratched across the blank tambourine of this notebook can render our intellectual turmoil as I ruminate upon such questions? I have surrendered the body.

I felt il professore’s spirit invade my mind and I suddenly realised how close he still was to me. I imagined his essence no longer knew the slightest boundary and could alight in all those who thought strongly of him. Thus our love for him could live and claim a long life. And simultaneously, I lamented that if no one thought of him, supposing that were so, then his spiritual existence would become ephemeral if not extinct and his newly found ubiquity would not be of the slightest use to him. In this sense, an afterlife would still be linked to this earthly existence. Indeed, he would be condemned to a vigil before his successors’ memories. I imagined the afterlife was a facet of memory. I computed that if writing was the greatest exploration of memory known to man and that writing was nigh an extinctpractisethen humanity would soon lose any rational link to the afterlife, leaving only superstition and magic in its place, and that death as reflexion would soon die for lack of thought, and writing would follow rapidly behind, leaving spontaneous chatter and sounds to placate the anxiety of the world become mass. Here I am again, crying. The world dies, you die, I die. We are dead. Serve me a drink. I can still drink: red ruby wine. Deep black spices from the Mediterranean. Poor olive oil from my groves. Feel my throat sting. Chew on the wild rocket, sun dried tomatoes. Cling to my loved ones and write poems for nobody.

heartbeat still

your eyes

summersaults on the breeze

you lick with your eyelashes

your face rises loud and sings

you pull dreams from my body

and lay a carpet of roses on my flesh

and still i cannot say yes

from my dumb teeth

chatter prophecies of despair

i dreamt of peace

of your hands clasped around mine in the night

i felt your whole body in my hand

you had already said yes

when we met

when you spied me from a distance of blue

incandescent heat

and vodka rising

i speak better in silence

sowing in the white furrows

my human attitude stinks

when i would like to hide

and learn to fly on the back of my poems

to your warm bedside

where i needn't be nor become

but rest and lie with my heartbeat still

song for gaugin

(copyright: from Dom Gabrielli's forthcoming book, 2011)

when i think of Gauguin i think of happiness

i think primitive and i think colours

i take you on my lap

my sensations

just as you take me deeply into your whispering

they speak of ships and ports

of stamen and bees

of open clams

but all of you is mine

and there are no images

i close my eyes to the sounds

to the music of your murmur

all is black in this world

you came

your mouth is not your mouth

it is eternity

it is the sun and the rain

you are a rainbow

our happy penetration is our slide

we fall and fall we must

into music into touch into joy

when i think of happiness i think of you

i think of the painter and his primitives

copulating on large green leaves

red and orange flowers are women

man is just a body devoid of consciousness

he is the conduit between touch and song

he is nothing in his phallus

providing his phallus can put his mind to rest

there is no battle if not the dreamy laughter of the tease

of the yes and the no

of the perhaps i will perhaps i won't

of the please which says i love you

and makes the sun shine when it rains