The name of my city is the title of a romance
For the one with no heart, everything is a tool for manipulation and control.
He who has no heart has only one last card to feel human: his image reflected in others.
There begins the tyranny of so-called “perfectionism.”
Perfectionism is not perfection, for perfection has a natural way of being; it has deep roots in time.
Perfectionism is a mere plastic flower placed against a wild rose.
It is a hijacked vision of our senses, created by deception to hide authenticity.
Vulgarity goes hand in hand with perfectionism, because both care nothing for genuine humaneness.
Both are anti-human:
they seek to replace sensible thought with shamelessness,
love with pornographic efficiency,
life with meaningless passage of time,
human brotherhood with mere “interactions.”
Perfectionism is the tool of the soulless human—
the one who has lost himself,
the one with no mother, no father, no God, no fatherland, no city, no friends.
The perfect, disoriented, AI-like human
who has no past or future,
already dead inside.
He craves certitudes and platitudes as boring as death,
as boring as himself.
The corpses in Gaza are still warm;
children may still be breathing under the rubble.
Yet the perfectionist insect has already arrived
with his self-aggrandizing plan
that has nothing to do with the soul of its inhabitants.
A golden cage after a rusted cage
is still a cage.
A golden chain is what a rapist gives his wife
after he has forced and abused her.
A golden chain is the continuation
of the rape of a people.
They don’t want a golden chain;
they want their village back,
their dog back,
their olive tree back.
They don’t want skyscrapers full of those who erased their town.
They want to see the sea again,
unimpeded by soulless, monstrous skyscrapers.
Some humans are ignominious beasts
hiding behind the appearance of a human.
The devil wears Prada
because he will never be content with a modest outfit,
even if his mother sewed it together.
The devil knows no love, no empathy;
he knows only mirrors of himself.
We must reclaim humanity.
And humanity was born in the eternity of a village,
not in a concrete-and-steel, boundless, soul-crushing, hideous mastodon.
Humans don’t want to call it a “smart city “ like a prostitute,
but the city they can call “theirs”, like their wife,
one they can fall in love with again and again.
A city is, before everything,
a place with a soul,
and souls are not born on an engineer’s planche,
but in crushed dreams,
in the fairy dreams of togetherness.
A city has hidden gems
made by time and the human soul together.
A city is a living organism,
born from the love of humans for their land,
for humans are not perfectionists,
but perfection itself dealing with imperfect reality,
not the other way around.
The name of my city is the title of a romance,
the place where my heart falls in love every day with the stranger’s steps
I hear passing by on the street
after a summer rain.