The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestials
of the Garibaldi Bridge, with a mixture of hatred and despair,
teaches us the intimate relationship between geometry and love,
to love as if we were maths surrounded by stray dogs.
Peggy you were drunk, normal mood,
in the slums along the bed of the Tiber
and alcohol, on August evenings, doesn’t warm you up,
clouding every sense in annihilating dreams,
transforming every chewed-up sentence into a gunfight in the back
on armour dissolved by the summer heat.
Lying on the edges of the bridge’s ledges,
among the drop-outs of the Rome open city,
you opened your heart to the gratuitous insult of Pedro,
your lover, and toppled over, falling into the void,
drawing gravitational trajectories from the sky to the cement.
Pedro wasn’t drunk, a day’s journey away,
you weren’t drunk, abnormal state of mind,
in the slums along the bed of the Tiber,
or in the empty parties of Milan’s movida,
with the intention of explaining to dogs and tramps
a curious lesson of non-Euclidean geometry.
Mounted on the edge of the bridge,
in the apathetic indifference of your distracted pupils,
you jumped, in the same trajectory of love,
along the same fatal path as your Peggy,
landing on the cement at the same instant.
The punkbestials of the Garibaldi Bridge, cleared by the local authority,
will spread a surreal lesson to every slum in the world
centred on the astonishing idea
that love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.