When the children you never bore have outgrown you with invisible tears they would have bawled. When the records you bought got scratched, becoming collectors’ items collectors never sought.
When girlfriends that became exes rolled down the River Exe. When, over the River Thames in 1986, you missed out on playing pooh sticks.
When gold and silver birds dined on the steps of Christoline. When blind-folded tourists went out to see the lights And came back with darkroom negatives of the sights.
That was when it happened and didn’t. When it was and when it wasn’t. When models posed where photographers had just sat. When rebels clicked on rainbows, and spat.
John Di Girolamo was born during the swinging middle ages as the Battle of Hastings raged outside on a cold, miserable Saturday evening just outside 'The Juggler's Arms' in Oxford, Torquay and Exeter at the same time. Born to a family, he spent most of his early years learning how to open umbrellas for a rainy day, and the runnings of horses and sword swallowers and the costs they incurred. Having graduated in 'Circus Management', he took to spinning plates for a living and persuaded his father to buy a restaurant to fund what he believed would be a lucrative career move. However, in the the days leading to The Age of Post Punk', he quit and would embark upon what was to go down in history doodles as a notebook.
Few knew it then but he had already started copying poetry, and often written by other people. As the minutes passed by, and Sardinia loomed, the idea of collages and drawings suddenly hit him as a way of filling up what had become a kind of book with pages and all. One day while storming off in a huff because his mum told him to, he struck upon the idea of putting it all together over a long-playing record (later a CD) and during a commercial break in the digital age, decided a blog would end Cromwell's ill-fated republic.
Sent off by recorded post, it would be by chance that his poems would get to their ultimate destination as, meanwhile, his pigeon who had queued so loyally for so long, sadly died the day before it was sacked.
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