These poems traffic in the day to day living of two talking heads, Giulia and Willi - residents in the barrier island Lido di Venezia, wizened by forty years of transatlantic crossings between Italy and the United States and now made idle by age and their forced removal from the public sphere of work. Clinging like exhausted swimmers to the forgotten creeds of western democracy, wherein every person is purportedly king and queen unto themselves, they take their dubious status to heart by wielding their metaphors with mortal irony.