and adrenalin.
When, for the second spring in a row, Gara’s young mistress was surprised by a damp heap of puppies in her laundry basket, that marked the end of Gara and Shakespeare-in-love’s romantic liaison.
After the procedure, Gara was no longer up for anything, uninterested in mating, she gave herself up to food and melancholy, while Shakespeare transferred his amorous vigil a few streets further away to Luna the spaniel and remained hers faithfully for ever more. After Luna came Hani the pug. His affair with the pug resulted in some interesting offspring of the canine genus, and, consequentially, the dog’s master reined him in, so that he was no longer seen without a leash, starry-eyed and frisky.
But before and after these serial monogamies, canine erotic romances, golden ringlets and defiant bristles, excavated bones and painful balls, Shakespeare always returned to his human. The dog did not resent it even when he had him castrated. Indeed, it focused his faithfulness and he was in a way grateful that he had been freed from sexual tension. Now he was able to adore his dear human friend with his whole being, with the unconditional, unrestrained, platonic, mad and pure love that only dogs bestow. His unalloyed devotion did not end even when his man abandoned him, leaving him in the street, why yes, like a cur, as people rightly say.
Only a dog can have such a stupid heart. A dog like me, a religious fanatic.
You know me? Shakespeare-in-love, the tailless ragamuffin, from a Schnauzer mother and unidentified terrier. Maybe you yelled at me when I was rolling a beef bone I’d stolen from the butcher down the street, maybe you kicked a stone in my direction or threw a bunch of keys at me when I sniffed your coiffured pup’s backside.
Towards the end of spring, my best friend left me in the wood beside the slaughterhouse, over there by the motorway, I walked for seven nights and six days, got home, with a bloody nose and torn paws and in the morning, in front of his house, when he was leaving for work, I threw myself at his feet, crazy with joy. He stopped in surprise and then said: scram!
And that was all.
I still wait for him in the morning, outside the building. I don’t throw myself at his feet, I stand to one side and wait, I only whine when he has gone.
Neither dirt nor poverty have dimmed the shine of my humiliation. Is there anything more dignified than being humiliated in love? It is a spectacular fall and the further you fall, the deeper is your sorrow, and the more magnificent your pain. You who skirt around me in the street, fearful and disgusted, should know that whenever you kick me you send me to the sky, along with your contempt, my love-luff-uff-uff that no one needs becomes ever more beautiful, this suffering could make a holy dog of me.
I’ve seen this too: a few days ago, my human bought a new dog. I don’t despair and I don’t hope, but I still wait. Besides, where could I go with this invisible chain with which I was born.
So, I ask you again, because I am a scrounger and beggar and skinflint if necessary – caught up in the vortex of passion or exasperated or astounded by feverish cries from the darkness, do not forget that in addition to feline love that screeches, there is also canine love that whines. Remember that at least in the morning, when the goodwill of a beginning briefly reigns, toss at least a bone to those genuinely hungry for the meat of hope.
Yours faithfully,
A Wistful Dog
If I had to describe Nightingale in two words, I’d say he is a street poet.
Although since he was twenty-something when he published a samizdat edition of just ten poems, he hasn’t written any poems but everything he has done could be called poetry. His collection was even called Poetry, which is neither good nor bad, but simply accurate. They were interesting poems, authentic, but he felt that he needed a new means of expression, for him paper was slow, dull and uncommunicative, while the Internet is garrulous, polluted and cacophonous, those are places that don’t offer space for development, that’s what he thought. He wrote poems with a felt-tip on walls, by night, on peeling façades, in lifts, toilets, on rubbish skips, in subways. He drew. He discovered spray paint. An excellent concept, always fashionable, he liked spray.
He said that when the poets left the streets, it was a bad day for poetry.
Because the first poets were guttersnipes;
noble Homeroid beggars,
the occasional Villon beyond the law,
Byrons who typically limp on the other side of the law,
and beatniks,
their distant relatives Cendrarses,
whole brigades of Bukowskys,
a few Bolans,
Rimbauds, Wildes, Verlaines, Dalmatian reporters,
rappers …
gentle decadents, anonymous painters and grafitti writers, Banksy
et al,
and too few women, poets,
(maybe, if we stretch the term, Tracy Emin? Nin, Anaïs?)
because for too long over the centuries their wanderings
have been hampered by the skirts and children round their legs.
The threshold of the house
and men’s shoes
women’s too, pointed.
On the other side of the street music wafts
from rhapsodes, troubadours, cantators, street singers:
young backpackers with a guitar.
They were all his gambling fathers and prostituted brothers,
although, although,
he used to say
you never know whose dad is whose.
Gale said that the poets were ruined when they focused on each other and their medium, language, and stopped thinking about the people they were addressing. They perfected their tools, they precisely tuned their instruments, but they sang into emptiness, with empty words, and empty space responded.
But bollocks to the poets and pseudo-poets, they will always have poetry, the blessed idiots.
Nevertheless, the first thing I heard about Nightingale was not that he was a poet or a grafitti artist, comic-strip maker or art student, and he was all of that, but that he was visited by women, all sorts of women and girls, when they fancied sex, unpaid of course, for he was not a tart. Approachable and affable, he would say: benign.
It was all strange to me, because at the time I kept seeing him with a girl, whom we called Helanka, she was a refugee from Bosnia, better known as a girl without a single hair (about which she gave various explanations). At that time I didn’t know there could be male/female friendships, because we had been taught they didn’t exist. And I didn’t know that Gale, Helanka and I would become inseparable for that brief phase of youth when your friends are more important than anything and anyone, but that passes as though it had never been, hello-goodbye, each to his own path forever and no matter.
