Joseph Fasano

There should be a "not interested because this is AI" button so the algorithm can learn how much humans don't want that stuff.

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My Grandma Fasano has left this world. If you're Italian, you know that means there will never be that particular kind of love, that Sunday feast again.

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translation by Gregory Hays

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 9:

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Note Left by Humanity in the Ruins after Heaney Sometimes we gave water to our neighbors. Sometimes we didn't hunt each other. Sometimes our fathers weren't broken and told to kiss their homes that would be stolen. Sometimes there was bread and wine on the tables and sometimes we remembered there was no such thing as someone else's mother; there was no such thing as someone else's child. Sometimes there were hearts that we could hear. Listen. We forgot that we could listen. Sometimes, when the fires died, it was dark enough. We walked out and we looked up and we saw it: the starlight, the starlight that had made us. Sometimes no one lay in any rubble with seven braids in her hair— a braid for every year she'd had. A braid for every year. —Joseph Fasano

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This poem.

To a Life in Despair Don't. Don't go to the bridge. Don't wake in your coat in the morning light and carry those stones into the river. Don't find your father's pistol in the attic, hidden in the family albums. Don't. Don't pour the pills into the whiskey, the walls dissolving like your childhood. Don't, just don't choose not to wake. Stay. Just stay. Tell yourself you'll do it tomorrow. You can always walk alone into the darkness. But not yet. Not yet. Not this soon. I don't have a reason to give you. All I have is the morning, and the autumn wind, and the child you once were in the darkness, looking at the new moon through the ruins, saying save me, save me, save me, and the moon looking back with her vacant face saying I promise, I stone- cold promise that the face of utter hopelessness is the face of something just about to change. —Joseph Fasano

for anyone in the darkness

please read this

Yes.

From this fact we can infer who has a vested interest in what is and isn't taught.

An educational system that does not sufficiently teach history will create students who do not sufficiently know how to recognize tyranny as it arrives.

Thank you.

October This is the season in which the lambs begin to die, in which the boy in his red and blue plaid shirt gets down on his wrists and his knees to crawl into the moorland at night and spread a cross of pumice on their foreheads, in which he reads to them a hymn like a freighter burning with a cargo of ripened fruit because in the morning he will have to kill them. Because in the morning he will wake to find his father standing in the hall like a horse with a lamp in its mouth and he will have to wade into a river with only that silence in his arms, and he will harm them. Because every year I watch him stand at the threshold of a season and begin to call them, to hold the ruined bodies of the dead with only a dim chord of flame between his lips and to touch them, to touch them and to be with them, to touch them and to sing with them, the way a child touches everything, with the hand of his murderer. —Joseph Fasano

My poem "October," which was published in @bostonreview.bsky.social and on @poetsorg.bsky.social, and which will be in my upcoming New and Selected Poems from BOA Editions:

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You're very welcome.

To a Life in Despair Don't. Don't go to the bridge. Don't wake in your coat in the morning light and carry those stones into the river. Don't find your father's pistol in the attic, hidden in the family albums. Don't. Don't pour the pills into the whiskey, the walls dissolving like your childhood. Don't, just don't choose not to wake. Stay. Just stay. Tell yourself you'll do it tomorrow. You can always walk alone into the darkness. But not yet. Not yet. Not this soon. I don't have a reason to give you. All I have is the morning, and the autumn wind, and the child you once were in the darkness, looking at the new moon through the ruins, saying save me, save me, save me, and the moon looking back with her vacant face saying I promise, I stone- cold promise that the face of utter hopelessness is the face of something just about to change. —Joseph Fasano

for anyone in the darkness

Maudlin House Maudlin House Shop | Life is Weird. Read Books.

You can pre-order your copy now: shop.maudlinhouse.net#the-teacher

Thank you. I'm glad it found you. 🙏🏼

Thank you.

Liszt in Autumn A new poem by Joseph Fasano.

I have a new poem in Cluny Journal: www.clunyjournal.com/p/liszt-in-a...

I humbly thank you.

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night...

As long as there are human hearts, there will be Shakespeare:

indeed

horrific that we have to write such words at all 🙏🏼

The Slain Children Tell us, what do the living do? Do you dance? Do you make bread with each other? Do you walk in the parks in autumn, smelling the late summer flowers? Is it true that some things get to grow old? What is the world doing now? Are you fighting with sticks and stones? Do you remember us? Do you lie down under the stars and listen to the birds passing overhead, and do you get to feel the little wings of your own wild heart be opened? You have somewhere to go then, don't you? Go. Don't let us keep you. We are earth. We are rainfall. We are silence. We are hiding in our favorite little places, waiting for you to tap us on the shoulders, to tell us it was just a game, come home now, and the bread and milk are waiting on the table, and the moon is new, and the gardens are in blossom. This sentence is the length of one of our shoes.

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