Orange marmalade buses in a traffic jam along the portside street with Vespas and Fiats and pedestrians on rush-hour feet.
Local fishmongers, displaying crab, carp and swordfish, set up stall, while nearby, waterway mermaids wait outside bladderwrackety doors.
Columbus’ city of cats cobbled together like cobblestones curled up on car bonnets or licking on leftover fishbones.
While in Centrostorico in a riotous rundown taverna, a haul of seafarers sink pasta and pesto vino bianco and Grappa.
Having had a breakfast brioche and Caffe Americano on Via Garibaldi, I find myself down by the dock looking out over the Ligurian Sea;
A compass spinning out of control and seagulls circling the crow’s nest. My Aquarian heart, waterladen with what to do next.
Gevova revisited (or Cagliari) I live here in a dinky Genova. Dinky buses and dinky boats and dinky matchbox cars.
A destiny turning on a compass getting dinkier by the minute, I look over a dinky sea with little fish trying to swim it.
Don’t get sea-weedy on me the bladderwrackety blabbermouth says much to the cormorants glee and the seagulls who seagully gaze.
Thinking big makes thoughts brain cell squeeze. Get a dinky breakfast down a via Garabaldi street.
I was talking to a friend tonight about Columbus’ city of cats and got to thinking about how 30 years is a long time but went a bit, or dinkily, like that.
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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A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 
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