Bryan Murphy- A Poem

Padanian Neighbours

Turin: the Calabrian Mafia’s laundry.

City-symbol bull’s heads bulge

from a Liberty façade

whose counter-sensual columns

the building holds in place.

100-year-old bourgeois family house,

apartments now,

lift and pipes the same good age;

lucky there’s a fountain nearby.

Stairs to keep you fit,

best Carrara marble, what else?

Bas-reliefs of city sights on unexamined walls.

Let’s see who’s inside.

Janitors from Naples.

Smile too much and miss the sun.

Somewhere keep three fine kids,

accident-prone yet never out of shape.

Ground floor is offices.

A hive of insurance ladies

drones quietly in one.

The other suffocates any aspirations

of grey, serial-failing businesses.

One by one, they leave.

Up a level. There’s a hotel overflow

and a millionaire eye-doc

whose patients’ relatives triple-park outside.

On the stairs those patients ebb and flow,

discussing lenses and degrees of strabismo.

Up again to a thick-set biker

husbanding a storybook blonde:

granite and quartz.

Opposite’s an uppity, uptight foreigner.

Don’t know why they let him in. Be gone soon.

In between, a wheezing widow, was someone once,

slipping away from her adult zombie son,

who visits when stakes are high.

Overhead, a flat of normal people,

stair-running brats who keep their adults

on a long leash,

next door to rich commie architects

who never sleep,

but squabble through the night

till dawn raises their son

to walk his machine.

Top floor reserved

for the neighbourhood hotelier,

best friend a sky-diving cat.

Padanian neighbours. On a good day,

you get tight-lipped greetings

they have to force out like trapped wind,

till a summer cockroach invasion

demolishes pretensions

and tickles their throats.

Glad they’re not mine.