Your mornings glow with freshness and moonlit embrace.
Your springs hold a calm no words can replace—
My homeland, your beauty is beyond compare.
No other land possesses such radiant delight,
Such gentle melodies and songs so bright.
Soft breezes whisper from horizons in flight—
My homeland, your splendor is beyond compare.
Your birds sing in harmony with the bakhshi’s tune,
Your summers and winters inspire hearts to bloom.
Your mountains hide precious blue stones in their womb—
My homeland, your value is beyond compare.
Inherited from our fathers through the years,
Treasured by our mothers, held ever dear.
When we tell your history, every word grows sincere—
My homeland, your glory is beyond compare.
At dusk, diamond stars adorn the skies above,
By day, the golden sun shines with endless love.
Even heaven speaks of your beauty from above—
My homeland, your radiance is beyond compare.
I call your gardens a land of miracles untold,
Your mountains magnificent palaces of gold.
I kiss your sacred soil with reverence untold—
My homeland, your name is beyond compare.
My homeland! Your happiness is beyond compare.
Maxmatqulova Amira Alisherovna is an 11th-grade student at Secondary School No. 70 in Dehqonobod District, Qashqadaryo Region, Uzbekistan.
She is the author of the book Dream Notebook (Orzular daftari). In addition, she has contributed her creative works to the Long Live Our New Uzbekistan! (Yashna, Yangi O‘zbekistonim!) collection and several international anthologies.
She actively participates in various competitions and has achieved outstanding results. She is a recipient of the Governor’s Scholarship, a volunteer, and the Youth Leader of Dehqonobod District, playing an active role in the development and engagement of young people in her community.
Her main goal is to study journalism and become a professional who contributes to the development of society, as well as to become a recipient of the prestigious Zulfiya State Award. So far, she has won first place in the district stage of this competition.
Life Motto:
“Criticism, delays, and difficulties are the keys to success on the path toward achieving one’s dreams.”
Some stories belong to a particular moment in our lives. We read them, close the book, and move on. Others remain quietly within us, waiting until experience gives us another way to understand them.
I first encountered Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose during my secondary-school years in Iraq, when the story was part of our English studies. Like many students of my generation, I first approached it as a text to be understood, remembered, and perhaps examined. I admired its sadness and the beauty of its language, but I could not yet hear everything beneath the Nightingale’s song.
Years later, I returned to the story—not as a student learning English, but as a poet and a reader who had lived long enough to know that words sometimes change their meaning without changing at all.
The story was the same.
I was not.
As a young reader, I saw a Nightingale willing to die so that a young man might offer a red rose to the woman he loved. The sacrifice seemed terribly beautiful. I wondered at the cruelty of a world in which such a gift could be wasted.
Today, I find myself asking a different question: not why the Nightingale chose to sacrifice itself, but why genuine sacrifice is so often understood only by the one who makes it.
And here lies one of the story’s deepest ironies: the Nightingale understands love more profoundly than the two human beings for whom it dies.
The Student speaks of love, but his understanding of it is fragile. He suffers because he cannot find a red rose and believes that without it he will lose the opportunity to dance with the young woman he desires. The Nightingale hears his sorrow and mistakes the intensity of his disappointment for the depth of his love. To the bird, he is the true lover it has always sung about.
Yet the Student’s love does not survive rejection.
When the young woman refuses his rose, he does not question her values or his own expectations. Instead, he dismisses love itself as impractical and returns to philosophy. His reaction reveals something Wilde leaves for the reader to discover: perhaps the Student was in love less with another human being than with his own idea of being in love.
The young woman, too, belongs to Wilde’s irony. She does not reject the rose because it lacks beauty. She rejects it because another admirer has sent her jewels, and jewels have a price that can be recognized. The rose, despite the life sacrificed to create it, has no comparable material value in her eyes.
Between them stands the Nightingale.
It asks for nothing.
It sings.
And in that song, love ceases to be an idea and becomes an act.
The Nightingale is therefore more than a bird in Wilde’s tale. To me, it becomes the moral voice of the story—the only character whose actions remain faithful to what it believes. The humans speak the language of love, but the Nightingale alone accepts its cost.
This makes the red rose far more than a conventional symbol of romance.
It is created through pain. Song, blood, and life are transformed into beauty. The reader knows what the rose contains, while the characters who receive it do not. They see only a flower. We have witnessed the life that created it.
That difference in knowledge changes everything.
The rose raises a question that extends far beyond Wilde’s story: Is the value of something determined by what it can be exchanged for, or by what was given to bring it into existence?
No amount of money could purchase the Nightingale’s final song. Yet the young woman prefers jewels. The tragedy is not simply that she chooses material wealth over love; it is that she has no way of seeing the invisible history contained within the rose.
There is something painfully familiar in that blindness.
We live in a world often skilled at knowing the price of things and much less certain about their worth. Wilde’s rose belongs to another measure of value. Its worth cannot be calculated because its true cost is hidden: a voice, a heart, and a life.
Perhaps this is why the story feels different to me now.
When we are young, sacrifice can appear almost entirely beautiful. Time teaches us to notice its loneliness as well. Giving does not guarantee understanding. Sincerity does not guarantee gratitude. Love does not always return to the person who offered it.
There is another, darker question beneath the beauty of the Nightingale’s sacrifice. Is sacrifice still noble when it is made for an illusion?
The Nightingale dies believing in the Student’s love. But the reader eventually discovers that this love cannot bear even the small wound of rejection. The sacrifice is genuine; the love that inspired it is far less certain.
This might make the Nightingale seem foolish.
I cannot read it that way.
Its sacrifice may have been misplaced, but its sincerity was not. The failure belongs not to the creature capable of believing deeply, but to a world incapable of recognizing what such belief costs.
By every practical measure, the Nightingale loses. The rose is rejected. The Student abandons love. The young woman turns toward something more materially attractive. Even the Nightingale itself dies.
But literature has its own measure of victory.
More than a century later, we remember the Nightingale.
We remember its song because it remained faithful to what it believed, even when the world around it could not understand the language of such devotion. Its death does not make its love meaningless. Rather, the indifference surrounding it reveals the depth of what was given.
This is where I now find the quiet power of Wilde’s story. It does not merely ask whether love is worth sacrifice. It asks what happens to beauty, sincerity, and devotion when they enter a world that measures them by entirely different standards.
And perhaps Wilde’s sharpest irony is this: the creature that cannot reason like a human being understands love, while the Student who prides himself on reason ultimately fails to understand it.
Returning to the story also made me think about the strange life of books themselves. A book waits without ageing. The sentences remain where we left them. The characters repeat the same gestures. The Nightingale sings the same song.
But we return carrying years that were not there before.
Perhaps that is why rereading can sometimes feel more intimate than reading. We are not simply meeting the author again; we are encountering the person we once were. Somewhere between the old page and the present reader lies the distance of an entire life.
I remember encountering Wilde’s Nightingale during my secondary-school years in Iraq, when works of English literature opened windows onto worlds far beyond the classroom. I could follow the story then and understand its sadness. What I could not yet know was how differently the heart would hear that song after time had added its own vocabulary.
Today, I no longer read The Nightingale and the Rose simply as a story about a bird, a flower, and an unfulfilled love. I read it as a meditation on the fragile distance between what we give and what the world understands; between value and price; between speaking of love and living by its demands.
Perhaps this is one of literature’s quietest miracles.
The books do not grow older with us.
We grow into them.
And sometimes, after many years, we return to a story only to discover that it has been waiting patiently for the reader we have finally become.
Raida Jarjes is an Iraqi poet, visual artist, and Founder and President of The Leading Word Humanitarian and Cultural Organization. She holds degrees in Law and English Literature and lives in the United States. Her published poetry collections in Arabic have been translated into English and featured in international anthologies. Known for her lyrical voice, she writes about identity, memory, love, and displacement. She also works in acrylic painting, wood burning, and collage, exploring symbolic imagery. Her organization supports orphans, widows, and displaced people, and promotes culture and human connection through creative and humanitarian projects. She continues to create and inspire.
Nidia Amelia García, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a writer and an active member of Juntos por las Letras (Together for Letters). She has participated in numerous virtual events in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Spain, Colombia, Portugal, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere. She has also contributed to literary anthologies such as “Books of the Immortals” and “Anthology of the 50 Poets of the World 2022.”
Degradation Processes in Irrigated Soils of the Kashkadarya Region, Ecological Challenges in Achieving High Crop Yields, and Strategies for Mitigation Using Biological Mulching Methods
Student of the Faculty of Geography and Agronomy, Department of Ecology, Karshi State University
ABSTRACT
This scientific article analyzes the ecological degradation processes occurring in the irrigated soils of the Kashkadarya region, particularly secondary salinization, soil erosion, and the depletion of humus content, which represent the main challenges in achieving high agricultural crop yields. Under the sharply arid climatic conditions of the region, the ecological and economic efficiency of applying local organic waste (wheat straw, cotton stalks) and the “Eco-Mulch” technology to restore soil fertility and optimize water resource utilization is scientifically substantiated.
The sustainable development of agricultural production and ensuring food security in the Republic of Uzbekistan, particularly in the Kashkadarya region, directly depend on soil fertility and the rational use of water resources. However, in recent years, due to global climate change, rising temperatures, and acute water shortages, various ecological problems and soil degradation have been intensifying in the irrigated lands of the region.
The specific hydrogeological and climatic conditions of the plain areas in the Kashkadarya region require special agrotechnical and ecological approaches to maintain soil fertility. Studying the main factors hindering high and quality crop yields and developing innovative, environmentally friendly methods to eliminate them is one of the most urgent tasks of today.
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2. MAIN ECOLOGICAL CHALLENGES IN ACHIEVING HIGH YIELDS (RESULTS AND DISCUSSION)
Conducted scientific observations and analyses show that the following main ecological and agrotechnical challenges exist in obtaining high crop yields from the soils of the Kashkadarya region:
1. Secondary Salinization and Mineralization: Due to high groundwater tables in the irrigated lands of the region (especially in Kasbi, Nishon, Mirishkor, and Muborak districts) and intense water evaporation during hot summers, capillary salts rise to the upper soil layers. This causes secondary salinization and severely damages the root systems of crops.
2. Water Scarcity and High Transpiration: Limited water sources for irrigation and the traditional furrow irrigation method result in 40–50% of water loss through evaporation, causing crops to experience water stress.
3.Depletion of Humus (Organic Matter) Content: Due to long-term monoculture cultivation (cotton and wheat), insufficient organic fertilizer application, and the inefficient practice of burning straw and stalks in the fields after harvest, the humus content in the topsoil has dropped to 0.8–1.1%.
4. Soil Compaction and Erosion: The frequent movement of heavy machinery, along with excessive use of mineral fertilizers and pesticides, destroys soil microfauna (beneficial microbes and earthworms) and disrupts soil structure.
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3. STRATEGIES FOR RESTORING SOIL FERTILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPROVEMENT (SOLUTIONS)
To overcome the above-mentioned problems under the conditions of the Kashkadarya region and to obtain abundant and environmentally clean crop yields, the following complex ecological and innovative measures are proposed:
1. Implementation of “Eco-Mulch” (Biological Mulching) Technology:
Shredding and sterilizing wheat straw and cotton stalks, which are traditionally left as waste in fields after harvest, and applying them as a protective layer between crop rows.
• Result: The mulch layer reflects sunlight and reduces water evaporation from the soil surface by 35–40%. Once water evaporation stops, salts do not rise to the surface, successfully preventing salinization.
2. Organic Humus Formation:
The applied straw and organic mulch gradually decompose, enriching the soil with biological humus. This improves soil structure, water permeability, and aeration.
1.
Natural Barrier Against Weeds:
Because the mulch layer blocks sunlight, it prevents weed growth. This frees farmers from using expensive and toxic herbicides.
2.
Drip and Mulched Irrigation Complex:
Combining drip irrigation with mulching in small areas and greenhouses makes it possible to increase crop yields by 25–30% and cut water consumption in half.
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4. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
To obtain abundant and sustainable crop yields from the irrigated soils of the Kashkadarya region, increasing the dosage of chemical fertilizers is not sufficient; rather, restoring the ecological and biological health of the soil is essential.
Research shows that utilizing the “Eco-Mulch” technology made from local organic waste:
• Allows for the conservation of irrigation water and the curbing of secondary salinization;
• Increases organic humus content in the soil and boosts crop yields by 20–25%;
• Establishes an environmentally clean and resource-efficient agriculture model.
It is recommended to widely introduce these recommendations in farms and household plots throughout the region.
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REFERENCES
1. Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan. (2020). On the Strategy for the Development of Agriculture of the Republic of Uzbekistan for 2020–2030. No. PF-5853. Tashkent.
2. Hasanov, M.H., & Raupov, B. (2019). Hydromorphic and ecological condition of irrigated soils in Kashkadarya region. Tashkent: Fan va texnologiya nashriyoti, pp. 142-150.
3. Oktamova, S.M. (2026). Eco-Mulch: Smart Mulching Technology for Enhancing Soil Fertility and Water Conservation. Synchronized Chaos International Journal, California, USA.
4. Ismailov, A., & Sattarov, J. (2021).
Soil science and problems of soil degradation. Tashkent: “Uzbekistan”, pp. 210–225.
5. Smith, P., & Gregory, P.J. (2018). Soil fertility and climate change mitigation strategies in arid zones. Journal of Environmental Management, 245, 112–120.
6. FAO. (2022). Status of the World’s Soil Resources: Salinization and Organic Matter Loss in Central Asia. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Oʻktamova Sabrina Mahmud qizi is a prominent and highly intellectual young representative of modern Uzbek youth, distinguished by her thirst for knowledge, social activism, and ambitious goals for the future.
Born on March 24, 2007, in Karshi city, Kashkadarya region, into an intellectual family, Sabrina graduated from school with excellent grades. She gained admission to Karshi State University (QarDU) on a state grant, where she is currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree in Ecology.
Despite her young age, Sabrina’s ability to fully capitalize on opportunities and achieve remarkable success is greatly supported by her parents, Islomov Mahmud and Geldiyeva Shahnoza. Her elder sister, Jasmina Makhmudovna, has been a key mentor and a significant source of inspiration in fostering Sabrina’s profound passion for knowledge and excellence.
Sabrina’s current achievements include:
• An active Eco-Volunteer and Social Volunteer.
• Regional winner of the Vociep project.
• Member of the “Children and Youth Support Movement” and a recipient of its special badge.
• An active member of the People’s Democratic Party.
• Recipient of over a hundred certificates from various educational and extracurricular programs.
• Participant in several international forums.
• An active participant and international certificate holder in the recent International Eco-Zakovat competition, recognized as a talented and active student and leader.
• An active member of the Kashkadarya “Golden Wing” Organization and the Youth Golden Wing initiative.
• Recipient of multiple Machine Learning (ML) grants.
Sabrina embodies a dynamic spirit, combining academic excellence with a strong commitment to social and environmental causes, making her a highly promising future leader and expert in the Field of Ecology
Blackwater Drowning’s frontwoman Morgan Riley carries herself with the kind of grounded ferocity that comes from years of carving out a place in a genre that demands both brutality and vulnerability. Her band, a five‑piece forged in North Carolina’s metal crucible, has become one of the most distinctive voices in modern melodic death metal by refusing to obey the stylistic borders that define so many of their peers.
As Riley puts it, “We’re not trying to fit into one specific little category. We want to just kind of take all of our bits of inspiration and make it into something kind of unique. And we’re not trying to fit some mold of, ‘we got to sound like this’. We just write what we feel. And I feel really passionate about that.”
Her origin story with guitarist Jeremy Bennett is one of parallel trajectories finally converging. “Jeremy and I had been in separate bands, and we played several shows together over the years,” she recalls. “Those bands ended up breaking up. I was in more of a hard rock band, but I always wanted to be more metal, and he was in a really good death metal band, and he wanted to do some more melodic stuff—because we’re both really big fans of Swedish melodic death metal.”
Their chemistry was immediate. “He started sending me stuff, and I started writing over it, and then Aria came into the picture. And several years later, Ron came in… and then Eamon joined, and he’s Ron’s little brother, so it just made sense.”
Looking back at the early EPs, Riley hears the band becoming itself. “When you first start a band, you are trying to figure out what your identity is,” she says. “We started out, I think, with a pretty strong identity, and I still really like a lot of those old songs, but now I feel we’re just more in focus to kind of the concept that we want to be. And I feel we don’t really sound a whole lot like anybody else… I don’t really hear anything that sounds exactly like what we’re doing. So, I love that. I love being a little bit unique.”
Her vocal journey mirrors the band’s evolution. Riley didn’t come up through metal; she came up through musical theater. “I actually came up in more of a musical theater household,” she says. “And I still love musical theater and singing big notes and all that stuff. So, I came upon a lot of that. And it definitely influenced the power.” Her first encounter with heavy women’s voices was transformative. “I think the first metal or hard rock woman that I heard was probably Amy Lee, as a lot of women in my generation did,” she explains. “And that was really big for me. She can sing beautifully, and then there’s this heavy music behind her, right? And then I discovered Flyleaf. And that first song ‘I’m So Sick’, where Lacey does that little scream—‘Oh my God, a girl does that! I want to figure out how to do that.’”
From there, she plunged deeper. “I went down a rabbit hole and found Arch Enemy, and became a big fan of that, just because it’s very brutal,” she says. “And Otep was a big one for me as well, because she does a lot of different things vocally. And I love the emotion that she puts into her voice. I draw inspiration from a whole lot of places. Lamb of God is a big one too. A lot of nu metal stuff.”
Her technique came the hard way. “When I first started, I literally just screamed along to Arch Enemy records,” she admits. “Messed up my voice for a few days trying to figure out how to do it, and I did it until I figured out how to not hurt myself with it.”
That duality—brutal and beautiful—is the core of Blackwater Drowning’s sound. Riley describes their motif with clarity: “If I had to describe us or kind of summarize, I always want to keep the heavy and some breakdowns. We don’t have to have breakdowns in every song—to show off our technical chops, because that’s fun—but never lose the groove of the music, and then keep the dichotomy of having the heavy, brutal stuff along with the beautiful melody.”
Their new album Obscure Sorrows—out now—is the band’s most collaborative work to date. Earlier releases were largely steered by Bennett, but this record opened the creative doors to everyone.
“We had the precedent that Jeremy was our main writer for those first two EPs and half of Sonder Satori,” Riley explains. “This is before Ron had joined the band. He joined at the very tail end of us recording our second EP. We had already had a whole bunch of stuff already written for the next one, and he contributed to that a lot, don’t get me wrong. But this time, we all kind of wrote together.”
The shift happened because the environment changed: they recorded the album themselves, with Bennett engineering. “We recorded this album actually ourselves,” Riley says. “Jeremy was the main engineer for all of that—well, the only engineer for all that. So, it was a little bit more relaxed than when you’re in the studio, because obviously when you’re in the studio, you are on the clock, and we don’t have a lot of money, so we’re not trying to waste our time, or their time, noodling around and figuring stuff out. You want to have everything ready to go, for our budgets. So, it gave us more space—I feel—to be spontaneous and creative, and with less pressure behind it.”
The orchestral elements that thread through Obscure Sorrows came from a trusted ally. “It’s actually our really good friend David,” Riley says. “He had been working on doing orchestration stuff for fun, and then also to put on albums. And Ron and him have been friends for a long time, and we’ve all played shows together. He’s a fantastic drummer, and we contracted him to write the orchestra parts. We’d send him the half‑completed song and be like, ‘Here, do your thing’, and we gave him some notes. And I think I’m really proud of the final product. I think it sounds really cool, and it’s something that we hadn’t really done before.”
Conceptually, the album began as a folklore‑driven project. “Originally, for the album, we had the idea that it was going to be a concept album where every song was going to be about a piece of folklore,” Riley explains. “And as we went along, there were some songs that I didn’t relate to any piece of folklore. I didn’t want to just write something and force it out, because that’s against my entire ethos. It’s got a… a song has to call for it.”
Still, folklore remains a strong thread. “The Sixth Omen was based around the legend of La Llorona,” she says. “And we did another song that was about a giantess—maybe her husband got killed, and no one has any sympathy for her, and she’s just a monster to them. And then ‘Incubus’ is… I mean, we knew what an incubus is, and it’s really just about that subject of, you know, you run into these people who are just an energy suck, you know? Drain you of everything.”
The album also reaches into depression, betrayal, generational curses, demons, and the afterlife. “I think obviously depression and stuff—that is always a strong theme in a lot of heavy music, and just music in general,” Riley says. “I think we all experience it to some degree in our lives. And then the afterlife—I think we all are really curious about what happens after, because nobody really knows.”
One of the album’s key tracks, “Storm,” is rooted in feminism—though Riley refuses to be heavy‑handed. “I have another song that’s more about feminism, which is ‘Storm’,” she says. “Because that’s a subject near and dear to my heart. But I didn’t want to be too on the nose with it, because that’s not really our thing, but I still want to say what I feel.”
Her feminism is grounded in history, not celebrity. “I feel I’m inspired by not necessarily any one person in particular, but just the body of work that feminism has done,” she explains. “And just when you look at history and how new some of these rights are to us—even in my grandmother’s day, we didn’t have some of these rights—and that’s wild to me. Just all the women who have come before me who have paved the way for the things that I have now… there’s so many of them, I don’t know if I could really choose just one or even a couple.”
For Riley, the most powerful part of being in a band isn’t the technical achievement—it’s the human connection.
“We did a tour, and we’re going up north, and a guy drove three hours to see us at this… we’re playing at this sushi bar,” she remembers. “And he has continued to follow us. He’s been following us since our first EP, and the fact that someone cares enough about what we’re doing to keep up with us… he actually got his very first tattoo was our band logo. That’s so cool.”
Then there are the quieter testimonies. “People tell me sometimes how a song helped them through a hard time,” Riley says. “And that always really touches me. I just love the human element of being in a band and affecting people’s lives in ways that you don’t even expect that you’re going to.”
She writes with that in mind. “When I write this music, when I write my words, I am talking about things that I’m going through, and maybe something a little bit more esoteric sometimes,” she explains. “But I always try to keep some element of relatability in there, so that despite the brutal setting, you can still empathize with what’s going on, and maybe it speaks to you. And if it helps you through whatever bad time you’re having—that’s really awesome to me, and that means a lot. Because as a metal band, you don’t expect someone’s going to be, ‘This helped me through my depression. You’re screaming.’ Well, it was really cool when that happened.”
Her conclusion is simple and devastatingly true: “It’s so rewarding as an artist to know that something that you created out of your heart and mind touched someone else’s heart. You connect with people on a deeper level that you’ve never even met. And that’s such a cool part about any kind of art. And that legacy carrying on is what makes artists immortal.”
Blackwater Drowning’s music carries that immortality: a fusion of personal history, theatrical instinct, metal lineage, and emotional honesty. Riley stands at the center of it—calm, powerful, grounded, evolving. She is part of a new generation of metal vocalists who understand that heaviness is not just sonic; it is emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. And with Obscure Sorrows out now, she and her bandmates have crafted a work that feels poised to carry them far beyond the borders of North Carolina’s metal scene, into a space where folklore, feminism, horror, groove, and brutality coexist in a single, unmistakable signature.
About the Author: Alex S. Johnson
Alex S. Johnson is a novelist, poet, editor, journalist, and cultural historian whose work threads the dark fantastique, bizarro surrealism, punk lineage, and countercultural satire into a singular voice. His fiction and poetry has appeared alongside Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Edward Lee, Joe Hill, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Poppy Z. Brite, and he has been hailed by John Shirley as “the Baudelaire of our time.” He has performed with such legends as Punk Rock Royalty Iris Berry from Lame Flames and Ringling Sisters, 2.13.61 (Henry Rollins) authors Tricia Warden and Ellyn Maybe, and SPIN magazine featured poet and cult author Danielle Willis (Dogs in Lingerie).
A veteran of the underground press, Johnson has written for Metal Maniacs, Zero Tolerance, Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles, and Metal Hammer. He is the founder of Nocturnicorn Books / A Collective Paw and curator of the Pawsie Awards. He is co‑writer (with Nicole H. Sixx) of the dark‑comedy slasher screenplay Serial Date.
We press the green button, abandoned to the illusion,
never aware of the irreparability of our ill-fated action.
Who is speaking?
No one.
From the acoustics emerge the noises of dead souls,
saved by cheap rates from outcomes of ill fate,
claiming insistent attention,
with the knife between the teeth.
PERIPHERAL BALLADEER
I can finally stop calling myself a poet,
not creating in hendecasyllables,
loosened in the acid, caustic, of my intuitions.
I create in the vernacular, measuring on no meter
the fragments secreted by the conflagration of existences,
Giovanni beheaded, and landed on two wheels in front,
in front of the clamoring sirens of the fire brigade,
in front of the ironic muzzle of a dog met in a courtyard,
in front of the assenting silences of the walls of an urban cemetery,
in front of the shouts of owner and editorial director,
in front of a walk among the currents of a warehouse,
in front of the certainty of needing no one.
A poet? No. Thank you.
I feel a balladeer, a writer of disgrace,
yielding every victory to souls never sated,
of honors, and of crowns, gathered face-down for the crown.
INVERTED VERSES
We do not sing of grassy mantles
dampened by a fine morning mist;
in our inverted verses
there lie stretches of synthetic turf,
reeking of pollution fumes.
We do not sing of smiling hills
warmed by the gentle sun of a gentle autumn;
in our inverted verses
there stand mounds of organic waste
piled in the middle of a road.
The stairs descend, catching junkies
in the act of shooting up,
with the indifference of being different,
to the rhythms of discounted music
from shopping malls.
We do not sing of crystal seas intent
on cradling boats with the sweet roll of waves;
in our inverted verses there are water tanks
from fire-suppression systems,
brimming with mosquitoes and sludge.
We do not sing of charming little girls
busy arranging their blond curls;
in our inverted verses
there are prostitutes beaten into soliciting
on the outskirts of urban sprawl.
We descend
into Paradise,
aedo Narcissus:
do not make a racket,
I will hold your hand.
MEOWING IN A CORNER
To the moon, saddened by blue clouds,
a celestial wall of a room,
I raise laments, faint meows of a furious brute,
against the crows hidden in the ivy,
against the worms concealed in the saucers
of Italian criticism.
A cat that roars at the moon, meowing in a dark corner,
without the courage to be a beast thirsty for flesh,
without the destiny to be a predator hungry for verse,
you find me thus, on spiteful evenings,
on harsh evenings of fluorescent anguish.
Hissing at enemies, ghosts, myself,
I lift lullabies, at times off-key,
from my left eye,
awaiting catatonic clashes,
love quarrels,
as a castrated sovereign.
A cat that roars at the moon, meowing in a corner
of a darkroom, unknown to all, unknown to everything,
chased across balconies stained with eviction,
intent on disturbing the sleep of those
who live by begging.
PRISONERS OF THE PRESENT
Prisoners of the present,
peeling the knuckles of our fingers,
bouncing off the chewing-gum walls of art,
wearying ourselves in the aisles of warehouses,
running, in vain, on the treadmills of fitness,
between fashion stores and discount shopping,
always, or sometimes, searching for what we had,
what we will have, or what we should have had.
Everyday life is a refundable emptiness,
rented out, to non-EU citizens, at fair rates,
it is overcrowded: dozens of individuals in a room,
with no chance to step down,
to compromise,
or at least to reduce the distance
between frenzied screams and tone-deaf voices.
Prisoners of the present, with no way out,
laboratory hamsters stimulated by mass-media anxiety,
we gamble on loves so vast they could feed oceans of mosquitoes,
and spray ourselves with hectoliters of Autan,
struggling to survive ourselves
until we wear out completely.
Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italianand international magazines. Between 2007 and 2024, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni,Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni, Kolektivne NSEAE and Lo Stato Pontificio with Divinafollia. It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 152 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. His verses are translated into 30 languages. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology) [https://kolektivnenseae.wordpress.com/], the legal “armed” wing of Italian literary latemodernism.
This essay will explain one of the ideas I have, very dear to my heart now, that we could use the chemistry to solidify and ameliorate the plastics materials, in order to use them in many more applications than today they are. And that we could do so as per a new utility for our plastic waste widespread across the world.
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The solidified plastic component.
In the daily use of items made of metal—and often, around me, of that rust-proof metal that allows for longer service life and offers the properties associated with metals and alloys (specifically resistance to pressure or torsion—or, to put it another way, solidity, at least as far as I can observe)—a very simple thought occurred to me (which you might deem naive): many of these metal alloys, or metals rendered rust-proof through chemistry, could easily be replaced by other materials for the same purposes and with virtually the same utility—often, I believe, with even greater practical utility—and, from what information I gather, at a much lower cost! Specifically, they could be replaced by some of the plastic materials that modern chemistry enables us to create!
Indeed, given that we can now easily engineer very hard thermoplastics—producing materials like polycarbonates that are incredibly strong, rust-proof, and virtually impervious to water—and given that we can (or so I understand) readily make plastic materials that are nearly fireproof and highly heat-resistant, we have—easily and cheaply—a plastic component that could be molded for many applications usually reserved for “stainless metal”…
One could design components for door and window fittings. Interior and exterior cladding components—such as vehicle bodywork or fuselage sections—or even structural elements like armor plating and furniture (as is already common), and perhaps even machinery parts, such as engine components, drive shafts, or gears.
Also, a wide range of household tools—hammers, shovels, screwdrivers, kitchen mills, and many others.
And perhaps even structural or framing elements for construction?
The primary immediate benefit would likely be a reduction in production and assembly costs. Naturally, the chemical composition of such hard, durable plastic elements would need to be designed first; this would likely yield a range of formulas, allowing for the creation of materials ideally suited to specific applications.
An entrepreneur looking to cut production costs might well consider reclaiming plastic waste—melting and reprocessing it for this purpose. We are well aware of the vast quantities of plastic waste scattered across the globe or sitting in landfills. It was actually while discussing my project—using nets to capture plastic waste at river mouths—with friends that the idea struck me: we could easily derive new uses from this existing mass of composite plastic waste through minor modifications—specifically heating, adding chemical solutions, and employing processes such as the thermosetting of polycarbonate compositions (which could also be engineered to be fire-retardant).
This same approach could—perhaps for different purposes—be applied to various other materials, such as vitrified ceramics and, most notably, wood; after all, it is well understood that wood can relatively easily be made extremely hard and resistant to heat, fire, and wear. Today, there are stylish watches made of wood, featuring a lacquer finish that protects them from moisture and corrosion…
And if I mention here the processing of plastic materials—specifically to make them fire-resistant and exceptionally hard and durable through thermodynamic methods, notably in the form of “polycarbonates”—it is to reiterate a key point: plastic waste and scrap can be found all over the world. While not biodegradable in their raw state, once recovered and reprocessed—simply by melting them down and applying chemical treatments—they could provide a vast supply of potential industrial components or even manufactured tools of genuine commercial value.
This was my idea—admittedly very simple, and perhaps you might even consider it naive. It turns out that plastics—in the form of waste or scrap—are now deemed dangerous to our natural balance and the environment by scientists and environmental advocates alike. In my view, one could easily develop a business model based on reusing them for this purpose—one that would serve the cause of the environment while also delivering social and economic value.
Born in 1984 in Paris, France, Timothee Bordenave is a French author of fiction and essays, and a poet. He has published many books, about 25 to date, and his literary works have been translated in large parts to about 20 languages… He is also a visual artist, whose photographs and paintings have been shown in France and in various international locations.
He used to work directing libraries in Paris, and then nowadays he is a full time creative. Timothee Bordenave has received several awards and distinctions, from around the World.
