Anyone who has tried to take a photograph while running knows the result: smeared light and edges that won't stay put. Luca Flauto's "XVI – Blurred" builds a whole emotional state out of that small accident. Its speaker is a person in motion who can't see clearly because of the motion. By the end, the poem suggests that clarity will come from stopping, not from running faster.
The opening stanza works almost like a riddle. Shadows lengthen as the day ends, vanish at night, and then are "enclosed / underneath a street lamp", captured and boxed in by artificial light. The next stanza makes the link to the speaker explicit: "I see myself scattering away / fading at the light of the sunset." A shadow is the part of us that follows us around, so when the shadows thin out, the speaker thins out too. The inner picture is just as vivid: "a clew of emotions in my soul." A clew is a ball of thread, so the feelings are a knotted tangle. The word is old-fashioned, and "clue" grew from it, so the tangle might also hold the way out, though the poem never says so. Then comes the plainest line in the poem: "my essence is screaming." It offers no metaphor and no decoration, which makes it feel unguarded.
The title word arrives in the third stanza, and with it the central contradiction. The speaker is "taking pictures while running / so I can relate, / so i can feel warm again." Photographs are meant to hold on to a moment, yet running guarantees that every one will blur. The speaker chases warmth, which is the opposite of the cold, fading light of the earlier stanzas, using the one method that can't deliver it. The slightly off-standard phrasing "I see blurred" also makes the blur a condition of the speaker rather than a feature of the pictures. The lowercase "i" in this stanza may be a slip or a choice, but it suits a speaker who feels diminished.
The fourth stanza offers the answer. The speaker craves "a balanced room / where I can watch all clear." A room is the opposite of the open street, being enclosed, steady and quiet. The key line is "let myself stop and start to live," where stopping comes first and living second. Then the scattering of stanza two returns as something to repair: "bent over to collect my scales." The poem leaves "scales" open. They might be flakes shed like skin, pieces of an old self, or they might be weighing scales, which would echo "balanced" just above. Either way, the speaker is bent over and gathering, a humble posture after all that frantic motion.
The final stanza is the only one with five lines, and the extra line works like an exhale. "Nice things should come, / soon or later" is carefully hedged. The speaker says "should", not "will", so the hope is modest and uncertain. The speaker will wait "sitting there, / on that stump I used picture." A stump is low and cut down, and it can't move, so it is the exact opposite of running. The last line, "when everything was blurred," slips into the past tense after a poem set in the present. The blur is already being remembered from the place of rest, as if the speaker has pictured the cure working. The English is not always standard here ("used picture" seems to be missing a "to"), but the roughness doesn't hurt the poem. It suits a voice that is more urgent than polished.
The form follows the same pattern. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, just short free-verse lines that read like thoughts as they arrive. Sound does some of the work: the hissing in "I see myself scattering" and "essence is screaming" gives the early stanzas a whispery, dissolving quality, while the last stanza gathers hard, stopped sounds like "stump" and "sitting". The title also frames the poem. "Blurred" is the first thing we read and the last word we hear.
The poem matters because it takes a very recognisable modern habit, recording life instead of living it, and shows how it can leave us feeling more distant. The Roman numeral in the title hints that this may belong to a numbered sequence, though that is only an inference and the poem stands well alone. It offers no triumphant ending, only a decision to sit down, wait and let the world come back into focus.