Guilio Regini Disappeared.

May be an image of text

Guilio Regini Disappeared

On 25th January 2016 Giulio Regini disappeared?

And nine days later as if by magic reappeared.

Words like disappeared seem so stupid somehow

as if the torturers and killers didn’t know then and now

who I was, where I was, and what they’d done to me

over those long hours of those nine days and nights.

Now in the silence I am able to speak about me and them.

Three times you broke my bones, and tore the nails

from my feet and my hands. And please forgive me

I confess I fully lost count of the number of times

you burnt me with cigarettes. Did you forget?

And you punctured my body with stab wounds.

And how could I overlook the sparks and electrodes

on my genitals, after all I was a man among you men,

and then you severed my spine with that final blow

and so my life was taken. Another stupid phrase…

But the torturers and executioners have many lives.

So many lives, far too many for me to easily describe.

Imagine them with their wives and their children,

all that sweat, blood and gore, my blood washed

and cleansed, as they handle their daughters, sons,

mothers too. The intimate way they touch their wives.

Are they clean and free of all, no, all that stains them?

How do they forget what it felt like holding me down?

Of the sound of rasped breathing, the smell of my sweat

as they strapped me and held me down. It’s forgotten?

Let’s agree not to call them monsters and demons

shall we? They are brothers, fathers, uncles, sons.

If we make them different we act and conspire

to make them special, different to the rest of us

making them different provides an excuse for us

to say too that we would not do what they did or do

when in fact they are like us, all of us, me and you.

A sickness been unleashed on this earth, this world.

Humans look at what you are, and all of what you do.

On 25th January 2016 Giulio Regini disappeared

the executioners reality was – he was in plain view.

©Rob Cullen20/08/2019.

Absence

Present absent lost.

He was here there

but parts were absent

lost on an Italian beach

amid 90 per cent casualties

Locked in a camp

with one water faucet

and 7000 thirsty starving men

waiting for red cross parcels.

He never wore

his campaign medals

or marched

up and down.

Saluting cenotaphs

as old soldiers do

at the parades

each year in town.

….

We lived

with photographs

sealed in a black box

locked under his bed

Photographs taken

of pre-war days

Serpentine deck chairs

of Regents park

Hyde Park

Speakers Corner

on Sundays

and those friends.

His memories

all gone

now then

and now he’s gone too.

Lost in translation

the silence

of survivors

shame and guilt.

And the inability

to talk

to describe

to anyone

Who’s never been

there, out there,

who can understand

without telling.

Without explaining

the emotion

the fear

and the elation.

Then the shame

and we his children

deal with

his silence.

sudden tempers

avoidance

of conflict and

alone in his garden.

Clinging

to silence

absence

disconnection.

Of being there

but not here

except to share a past

that came before.

He returned

but he was not

the same man

they said.

I knew only

this man

that man

not the one before.

Sometimes it was like

dancing with a ghost,

the unsaid words

the brief glimpses.

Remembering Anzio & the ones who went before.

Part of the long poem “Absence” previously published in Rob Cullen’s Poetry & Photography Collection – Uncertain Times. 2016 & republished 2023.