☀ Today's Poem: "dead friends" Matthew Moore

Rome’s alleys are washed in the blood of Fascist and anti-Fascist graffiti.
Sentenced names. Fateful names. Helpless, the hands scrawl out fate.
It is fate the perpetrators run guns for. Dead echoes. Carnate remnants.
Heaven’s contingencies. Observation cannot allay breath’s prejudice.
Thrush hides low in the heart’s bush, still, and beating, between thorns
And dust, under the needle of the moon against the dungeon’s shaft,
The four shafts, cut into the four walls, so narrow, each admits a thread
Of moonlight, four needles weaving four threads for starlight’s dress,
Dunning the floor of the dungeon for cloth-light, air clotted with vision.
The dungeons are washed in the blood of anti-Fascists, and partisans,
Of noms de guerre who La Decima tortured and killed, score after score.
Fascism’s operatives are beholden to its targets and all its brigandries,
Including love and torture, form its grammar, the lines its tongue trawls,
On wanton ropes of blood, if sea snails and brass shells hug, noosing,
By arms, and legs, and necks, asemic populations of breath, and hoisted up
Corpses, enfleshed in every room by fires and knives mutilations hide,
In every room no vacancy keeps, to parody, thus unite, a residence on earth.