By Annalisa Nicastro

"I dreamed that all my teeth had fallen out but my tongue survived to tell the story. For I am a distiller of poetry.
I am a singing bank. I am a pianola in an abandoned casino on the seashore in a dense fog that is still playing."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

They call me a poet, but I'm just someone with eyes wide open to the American dream stumbling through neon lights and lonely voices. In New York, I begin my journey, amid laughter and giddiness, lost in the whirlwind of a nation laughing as it slides down.

I look and cannot close my eyes. They call me a visionary, but all I see is what is there, under the open sky: a naked America, without masks, crying out to be heard.
I grew up among hard, gray streets, and one day, reading Whitman, I found a voice that spoke of freedom as if it were air.
So I became a poet, not by choice, but by destiny, to give sound and form to a different America, to a dream that was not drowned in the noise of coins. Coney Island taught me that life is a carnival, a fair of illusions, lights and warping mirrors.
But I saw beyond the laughter, beyond the glittering facade. I saw people wandering in the crowd, without purpose, lost in their own loneliness. My poetry was born there, in the playgrounds of America, in the dark streets and smoky bars, among forgotten faces and lost souls.
I set out to write to remind myself and others that we are not machines, but human beings made of fragile flesh, dreams and bones. Then came the war, and with it, the horror. I saw the hatred, the chaos, the madness of bombs. And I vowed to myself: never again.
There is no glory in death, no justice in spilled blood. And so I wrote for peace, because I believed, and I still believe, that words can change the world, that a verse can stop a bullet.
And then San Francisco, the refuge of the homeless, where I open a bookstore of forbidden dreams, City Lights, a lantern for lost souls seeking shelter from the shadows.
I keep verses on my shelves, words sharp as knives against power, and a bright sign against all war. I am a pacifist, yes.
It is not me who is blind, it is the world, which has turned violence into habit. Poetry is my tool, a silent protest, a reminder that war is never the answer and humanity can still choose not to fall to its knees in the face of destruction.
My comrades are the poets, the rebels, the madmen, those who do not bow to authority.

We dreamed of a different America, we shouted against the cannons with love verses, we tried to wake the world with words like fireworks in the night.
But what remains today?

If not this paper, these words, fading like waves on the shore.
I am just someone who sees, a poet, a witness.
And if someday someone will still read my words written in the wind, know that behind them was a heart, a look that never stopped believing in the power of peace, in the voice of the people, in the dream of a life without chains. And now, here in the waning light, I see a different America than the one I dreamed of. But I don't regret my struggles, my rebellious words.
My voice is still here, in the rustle of the pages of a forgotten book, in the gentle breath of the San Francisco wind. If I had to leave one last message, I would only say:Never stop dreaming.
Never extinguish that flame that burns within, the one that drives you to search for truth in the folds of the world. For even when all seems lost, that is where poetry is born, that is where freedom lives.

Ferlinghetti closes the book, a faint smile on his lips, as one who knows that his words, perhaps, have changed the world quite a bit.
And so, Ferlinghetti fades between his words, leaving a trace of rebellion and hope that remains alive between the pages and the streets, like an echo of what has been and what can still be.

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