My flat’s in a small little piazza where bars and restaurants have made it the ‘in’ place. There’s a big palm tree surrounded by windows and shutters and balconies, with pavement stones at its base.
The living room is the best room ‘cos it overlooks the square. It lets in the outside world; shelves its books, catalogues its records. tables its hungry mouths, and lies out its legs on its sofa.
Along the long corridor are the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen with their flings’n’slumbers, piss’n’shits, pots’n’pans. The cleaning usually gets make-shift done to Sunday morning radio. Flies may thrive, but the odd incumbent cockroach gets stamped on under the strictest of life-bans.
My flat is where an upside-down key opens a back-to-front door locking me away from everyone and everything. My cat waits to be fed and waits for me back home. We both fall asleep, while night fortune-tellers plot what tomorrow might bring.
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 