GARDENS OF STONE
REMEMBERING VARNALIS
Raquel Angel-Nagler
THE BALLAD OF MENIOS ( A DONKEY)
Men are born men,
But, little by little, some become donkeys,
Like a folk story. Folk stories remember old truths.
The donkeys: the patient eyes, the stubborn feet, the working shoulders.
They carry whole quarries
To build the holy world of the strong.
They carry whole fields
To give the holy bread to the strong.
They carry whole armories
For the holy wars of the strong.
They know so little, they are too tired to think.
They don't know that they are victims.
They don't know that the victims create themselves.
They don't know that the victims create the strong of earth.
They have to believe in something, in order to survive,
So, they believe in the god of the donkeys, and the heaven of the donkeys.
They don't know that the strong of earth
Created the god of the strong, and the heaven of the strong.
There is no heaven for donkeys. There is no heaven for pain.
They don't know that the only heaven, the only hell,
Are here, in this world, in this life.
They don't realize how strong they are, how many.
One day, the donkeys will rage,
They'll rage like an earthquake, like a lava of pain.
Earthquakes change the world. Forever.
***
We can love many things at the same time.
We can love many women at the same time.
There are many ways to love.
The person in our head is human, he loves imagining, painting thoughts, images.
We need imagination in order to live, in order to love.
And the person in our palms
Leaves, each time, other images on the body of love.
So, we are busy living, loving.
But somewhere, we grow old, and death grows inside us.
Yet, we feel that the river of time carried the images, the loves,
Too soon, too far. We are thirsty.
We try to grasp time, we try to grasp the images,
And all we have in our fingers is a water fall.
Our face flowing, secret, clear, lit, shady,
Into the river.
***
THE DEAD SLAVES
Our eyes open outside, and closed inside.
They look at the blind moon.
Inside us, all the infinites: the earth, the sea, the sky, end.
Inside us and outside us, the world is empty.
The only things alive are
The ivy: a hanging river,
And the river of time that takes us always further, always deeper
Into the world.
Maybe, one day, the river will flow towards humans,
The infinite humans, the free humans.
***
THE SLAVES LAMENTING THE DEAD SLAVES
We came from very far.
We are slaves for longer that what we remember.
But inside us, there was always someone free,
And this someone grows inside us always taller, always deeper.
Everything is ready for the journey to humans.
Everything is ready for the rage of the slaves.
Everything is ready for the raging slaves to own their rage, to own its power.
Everything is ready to own their life.
***
I was a strange child.
I wanted to be a grave digger.
I never saw a dead.
But I wanted to feel in my hands the earth, the endless earth,
To feel the sun painting itself with indelible light.
And to feel the alone, the infinite alone.
But, I became a dreamer, I dreamed of freedom,
So, I became an outlaw, a traitor.
They shot me. The first dead I saw was myself.
Now, I travel into the world always more, always deeper.
I feel the endless earth, I feel the alone, more alone than ever.
I see the century, the whole century, from somewhere high,
Maybe near the indelible sun: tiny. Bleeding.
And I feel time: it's only future, it goes always further.
Maybe, one day, life will be a journey to humans.
The endless journey. The endless future.
And the century will be big, as big as the person in our head. He is free.
This person, the free person in our head,
Knows that, at times, 'traitor' is a name of honor. A medal.
***
CHINA
You: earth infinite, eternal.
The first thoughts of man.
The first paper where man wrote what he thought.
And the first dike taming the untamed:
The river of passion, the human river.
We salute you Confucius.
Your face is yellow, but your blood is red.
You spread the yellow peace over the red blood.
The peace was free.
And the river of passion, the human river is tamed,, yet, it's free.
Rivers are tamed by the laws of the world, yet, they are free.
There is no freedom beyond this freedom.
There is no river beyond this river.
***
THE SONG OF ATTALOS
This carnivorous earth tires me.
It dug its teeth in what I remember, in what I saw.
I am light.
I donated whatever I had to the living,
And now, I'll donate my life to death.
I'll do it lightly, as light as the foam of a wave.
Poor Attalos,
Even the foam doesn't die lightly.
It rages at the sea that fades,
It cries, and its cry is heavy, heavier than itself.
Losing makes us heavy.
It cries for the sea that fades, the infinite sea that is lost.
It cries like a giant, it cries like an human in pain.
***
THE FIRST OF THE YEAR
At the table
Men: wolves in sheep skin.
They devour a whole flock of sheep
Voracious. Without remorse.
After all, they are the strong of the world,
They inherit the earth, and they'll inherit probably also heaven:
They pray, they confess.
Even the hunger out of the door,
The smell of hunger mingling with the smell of sheep,
Doesn't sadden them. Sadness is human.
The wolves are innocent,
They devour a sheep of their hunger.
But the men at the table are carnivorous.
They devour, body by body, the hunger of men.
***
'IF' OF KIPLING
A POET
If your words cannot write your truth, if your words are a lie and you know it,
If your words could stand by the wall where they shot people, peaceful,
If your words make the holy body of love when it loves- unholy,
If your words don't believe in the life of the others, if they sell them cheaply,
If your words believe in hate, their only religion,
If your words love the crimes of the century: the hunger, the wars,
Than your words are a killer.
One day, they'll kill you:
The bullet they stole from the wall, a souvenir,
Is alive. It will explode.
***
Poets, more than a Midas, are gold miners.
They know how to find the gold hidden in plain sight:
The heavy warmth in a gaze.
They eyes of a mule, patient, honest.
A leaf riding on the water of a pool, light and heavy as light.
Their song lets the gold shine, clear and pure.
Their song lets people love the exquisite jewel .
***
VARNALIS: 'YOU, PRIAPE, GOD OF THE PENIS, YOU LIVE LIKE A DONKEY IN HEAT'
Some accuse the donkeys
Of being too sexual, too virile.
But, the donkeys are innocent.
They love their Dulcinea in the season of love.
There are donkeys among us
Who rape all the Dulcineas of the world,
In wars, in dark alleys.
Beautiful Dulcinea,
There is no season of love anymore,
And rape has no seasons.
***
THE PORTRAIT OF MIRANDA
Little girls are dolls.
Their dresses bought from China,
Their laughter- from Hollywood, U.S.A.
They go around with their small bag: a shield,
But it doesn't protect them from the fate of a girl,
From the fate that makes them women.
Only their silence will have the license to be free.
And the body of love, the free body of love, will have no license for freedom.
But they would have the license to multiply the human species,
Which will make them holy.
A lonely icon.
***
THE GOOD CITIZEN
The old man is dying.
He was a soldier in all the holy wars.
He beat and shot at the wall prisoners, traitors.
He and the bullet obeyed orders.
When he returned,
He continued the beating: the wife.
Some habits are stubborn.
Now he is sick, he is hungry, he is dying,
But he is quiet.
He knows that the poor and the humble will inherit the heaven.
He doesn't know that the strong of earth
Created the god and the heaven of the strong.
The poor will be holy.
They'll inherit the holy hunger, the holy humbleness.
***
Africa,
The sad black woman.
You came from very far,
And you carried with you the animal of hunger, your black hunger.
The animal is innocent, and you are innocent,
Because hunger is innocent.
Your ravines: dark, deep, warm.
Inside them monasteries died.
Your feet: a gazelle, time- a waterfall in your feet,
And yet, they caught you.
They put you in all the cages of the world.
They told you that human is white, that innocence is white, that god is white.
Africa,
The black sad woman with the black hunger and the black silence.
One day Africa will cry,
The cry will be red, and it will not be innocent.
It will be the red blood of black Africa, the human blood, the ancient blood,
Raging .
***
ONE-EVERYBODY
You are born
With the picture of the world inside you,
And the picture of people.
And yet, you are alone.
You feel alone when you are with yourself.
You feel alone when you are with others, when you travel with others, the big-small journey.
You feel alone when the blind look for your face with the tips of their fingers,
And when the hungry look for you with the ten fingers of hunger.
One day, when the death inside you will be always bigger,
You may see the others. You recognize the pictures.
The others that lived inside you, from the start,
As if they were half your life.
Maybe, when you die, you'll die half a death.
The others will stay behind, they'll lament.
After all, they carried your picture inside them, from the start.
***
ABOUT FREEDOM
They shot us at the wall.
The bodies are many, they are another wall by the wall.
They kill us, and they defeat themselves,
Because the dead remember
And they remind the living
How to live for life, how to love life so much,
That you can die for life,
And how to be so infinite, that when they shoot you,
Your blood spread in the mud, your ancient blood, your blood full of freedom, your blood of a human,
Will be a seed.
It will grow.
***
THE STYLITE
Naked on my column,
Naked as the rain, as the sun, as the hunger, naked as dying.
It feels as if my body was made of pains that are not its own,
Yet, it bleeds.
It feels as if I were closer to god.
And yet, I bleed.
Beneath me, the city, a centipede,
Million feet burning, shrieking, blind as pain.
And inside me, someone who is still alive, shouts:
You have to love life so much, that you can die for life,
You have to love life so much that you wouldn't die for death.
You have to love the people so much, that you could die for the people,
You have to love the people so much, that you could live for the people .
The only God is life.
Your life and the life of the others.
The only religion of man.
I came down the column to God.
***
AUTUMN
Death is everywhere, and yet, it is invisible.
Life is deep in the vines, in the baskets full of grapes, in the wine.
It is the realm of Bacchus, the religion of people.
The happy wine, the magic wine.
It lets us forget whatever has to be forgotten,
It blinds our sadness.
So, we don't see the death of a leaf, we don't lament it.
Yet, at times, poets sing it.
Sadness is the poet of humans.
***
TWO WORLDS
In the arena
My twenty years fight.
In the arena,
Not only one, a million of people fight.
The religion of death fights the religion of life.
Even the old fight:
Old Diogenes with his eternal torch,
He looks, amidst the bleeding mud,
For Man.
One day, he'll find him, maybe he'll find many.
They will come from very far, from the journey to human, to free human.
They will be the religion of life.
Of course, there will be death,
But people wouldn't die like an animal, with a knife in their cry.
They'll die the death of a human.
***
THE GREAT UNKNOWN
The grave.
The under-world lit with its dark light.
Someone enters, he was murdered.
Beneath the bleeding mud, we don't see his face.
He says he is the nameless soldier, the great unknown.
He says he came from very far,
He carries with him all the battles of the ages, all the betrayals,
All his defeats.
And he carries people. The people of the world. The great unknown.
He says he is the religion of life, of whatever is human,
And we are the religion of death,
Because we killed whatever was alive. We killed life.
We killed ourselves.
No one can live without life.
No one can live without the life of people.
He says that the unknown has a name: humans, the infinite humans.
He says that life, and the life of humans, is the only god.
***
Night. The cold shivers in the trees.
You feel your breath tall, as tall as freedom,
You feel you breathe together, you and the infinite freedom.
But, you wake us, and only your cell breathes with you.
You know so little.
You don't know that when you sell your life, you sell, first of all, your freedom.
You don't know that you protected your soul, too much.
You closed it inside you. Freedom needs space.
You don't know that you cannot beg for freedom, to get back what you sold.
No one will give it to you.
You don't know that you have to find it yourself.
Maybe, one day, you'll find it, and you'll make it each day
A little wider, each day a little deeper, to let in the infinite people.
Maybe, one day,
You'll know that the person in your head is free.
You'll know that you put that person in your head,
And you'll know that the journey to humans put him in your head.
The endless journey.
***
THE BALAD OF ANDRIKOS
The boat of Andrikos, the hunchback.
Naked bones in the sand.
It dreams the distant smells of distant sea gardens.
Some mornings, when the sun is close,
Andrikos the hunchback and the friends,
The men, pirates of love, and the girls: the exquisite loot,
Dream in the boat.
But winter comes, dreamless, harsh.
It makes the life of Andrikos the hunchback bleed.
The boat, a mother, tender as a lullaby,
Will take Andrikos the hunchback,
Each day, a little more, each day, a little deeper,
To another dream.
***
A SONG TO FREEDOM
Spring. The dream giver.
We dream freedom, and we feel it dreams us.
We knead new souls from the warmth, and we feel they knead us.
We are tall. As tall as the sun, as tall as our dream.
We are young. We dream young dreams.
We forget that the sun, the free sun, is a symbol. Symbols are dreams.
We forget that the sun, the infinite sun, has to obey the laws of nature.
Beyond nature there is only nature.
Beyond the laws of nature there are only the laws of nature.
This is the true song of freedom.
***
In a corner of the street, the blind violinist.
He plays as if he poured out the clear water in his body,
The clarity he never saw, but he felt.
As if he pressed softly the grapes in his mind,
The exquisite wine . it sees.
As if the song were a path, a nomad in his life,
And his life was a nomad in the song.
***
We created the body of the gods from mud,
And their mind- from mud,
And we worship the holy mud.
The poets are important.
They purify the laurels of the gods from the smell of fear. The cruel smell.
They let them pour their burning sperm
In the clear water of a body. A girl.
And the magician in their words
Makes the sperm exquisite.
The sperm of a hero.
***
APHRODITE
Maybe there was no Aphrodite,
No soft foam that bore her.
It doesn't matter.
We bear her
In each body of love when it loves,
The exquisite body of love.
In each body of love we bear her,
More infinite than ever.
In each body of love we bear her
Always more, always better.
***
We live,
And yet, we forget the great debt to life.
And we forget many other things. We forget our mothers:
The cross-roads that brought us here, to the human,
And the person in our head that made us human,
And the people who taught us the words of a human.
These words weigh much.
We are the orphans of the world, the mute of the world,
We are lonely, and we may be cruel.
And we forget that the only god of a human
Is the remembering that he is human, and that he is a mother,
Each day a little more, each day a little deeper.
***
TANIA
Your body is tiny,
But your body of love is infinite.
You share your innocence: burning, pure, dark, lit,
And you share the wind, heavy, moist, in your path.
I know the poem of your feet:
In shoes, in stocking, bare.
I miss the poem of your feet.
I envy the path that feels them,
I envy the wind, heavy and moist, that breathes in your feet.
***
You are a fish,
And the darkness swallows you.
You are a bird,
And you swallow the light.
You are simply human,
The infinite body of love.
***
We dance, we run, we jump,
As if we tried to shatter with our motion
The river of time.
But the same river of time
Passes through our motions only once.
It shatters itself in our feet,
And it carries our motion into another river, always further.
There are many rivers of time,
Each moment is another river, miniscule and infinite.
And yet, beyond the rivers of time
There is only a river of time, the endless river.
***
We die.
Our body is a piece cut from the night.
Our body is open,
It lets the world in, more than ever.
There are no eyes to fear it.
For years we believed our ears and not our eyes,
And it is sad.
We have to die in order to see,
In order to buy the first- hand truth with our eyes, our infinite eyes.
***
Poetry is harsh.
We judge our song,
And it judges us.
And the people who hear the song, judge too,
But when they sing it,
It is becomes more, much more than a song.
***
We may be less wonderful than what we imagine.
We may be more wonderful than what we fear,
Which is another kind of imagination.
We are simply human,
And we imagine ourselves
In order to see ourselves better.
Imagination is the magician of the tribe, his hundred eyes.
It knows how to see.
***
We fought the way we lived;
Each one alone in his body, each one together with the others.
Our blood, deep in earth, like a root.
But, our debt to life is still unpaid.
We feel life as close as hunger, as close as pain.
The root is stubborn.
It is not easy to uproot such a root.
The debt to life makes it always deeper, always more infinite.
***
We come from very far.
Somewhere, sometime, we had eyes, ears, mouths.
But we live for so long
Blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
We don't see that we own nothing:
The dawn, our hands, our life,
Nothing except the dark light of pain, of dying.
We don't see that we fight battles that our not ours,
And that we don't fight the only war that is our own:
To get back our eyes, our ears, our mouths, our life,
We don't know that each step is the end of something,
And the first step of something.
Maybe, one day, the blind pain, the deaf pain, the mute pain,
Will erupt. A lava of pain.
Lava changes all the paths of the world.
We'll make the last step of the blind,
We'll make the first step to the inevitable: the human.
He sees, he hears, he is ready for everything. He is free.
***
We try to begin from the beginning.
We throw into the abyss of time
Whatever we loved, whatever we felt holy, whatever we dreamed.
We don't realize that the past is deep inside us,
That there is no abyss deep enough to contain it.
We don't realize that each step is the last step of something,
And the first step of something,
And we need the last step, in order to make the first one,
In order go on.
We don't know that the only path finders
Are the laws of nature, and the journey to humans, the endless journey.
Beyond the laws of nature
There are only the laws of nature.
Beyond the journey to human,
There is only the journey to human.
***
We are strange bulls.
Our season of love is each day, each moment.
And we are human,
So, the cloth in front of the bull blinds us, and gives us, at the same time,
Other eyes, deep, dark, lit.
We see the cloth over the body of a woman, we see its dream of love.
We see the night between the thighs, we look: her night in our night.
We are human, so we have the power to imagine,
And imagination is the best, the most exquisite, the more eternal aphrodisiac ever.
***
We wouldn't put flowers on your grave.
We'll put earth.
Earth is life, earth is death, so it is eternal,
It will keep your struggle in its eternity.
It will keep your death in its eternity,
And it will embrace your blood, your ancient blood, your free blood,
Like a seed.
It will embrace you with the hands of a lover, with its belly of love.
***
CENTAURUS
There are Centaurs everywhere.
We carry the first animals ever, and they remain in our body:
The way we flee, the way we fear, the way we fight.
We may not have the body of a proud horse,
We may have a mule: patient, stubborn, humble, honest,
Or a four-legged snake with poisoned earth in its mouth.
When we hurt, the animal of pain hides in a corner of silence,
And when they kill us, they kill the free animal inside us, with a cage in its cry.
And we walk towards the human, half animal, half man.
We should be careful. We may be dangerous.
***
THE BANQUET
We sit at the table.
That's where humans have their feasts.
On the table: wine full of suns.
Around the table: young bodies, leaves of an ivy.
They give shape to the longing,
And someone plays the music of longing. An enchanted rustle.
At the table: men.
Their shadows moist with the exquisite wine: passion.
It could be a banquet of the gods.
After all, we created the gods in our shape.
We let them ride, godly, eternal, on the passions of man.
***
The tavern in the cellar.
Among the shadows of the smoke:
The shadows of people.
The shadows are bent, they are fearful, they are helpless.
They drink the wine in order to swallow the other poisons:
The pain of living. The pain of dying.
They don't know whom to blame:
God, fate, luck.
They don't know that shadows are stepped on in the streets,
They don't know that no one should step on a humans, not even on his shadow.
They don't realize they should leave the shadows where they belong: the shadows,
And rise on their feet, the immense human feet,
To be as tall as life, as tall as a human who struggles.
***
We came from very far,
From the first wars of the first tribes,
And we never forgot how to hate.
We hate the world, and we feel that the world hates us.
We grasp with bleeding hands pain, and it grasps us. Two prisoners of life.
Our hatred made us lonely. It is the most terrible jail: our own.
Maybe we want to love, but we fear it, we have to protect ourselves, always.
Love is dangerous. It is too naked.
***
THE CHURCU BELL
No one understood what the church bell said,
Because each one has his own bell.
Someone hears the sound of the first wound,
The wound as close as earth, as death, as God.
Someone; as if they pulled out the mad nails. He was free.
Someone: as if it were the soft sound of his thoughts.
Often thoughts soften with the years,
They learn how to be tender, how to be human, always more.
Someone in cruel mines, and in the cheap hotels of love,
Hears a cry inside the sound, the cry of a human who is sold.
Someone realizes that ideas are not the child of god.
They were always the child of the world and his child. The tender, harsh child.
Someone: that the body of love when it loves, is holy. A human god.
And someone realizes that whenever they crucify you,
The nails are innocent, but your silence is not. You should have raged.
And the ringing continues.
***
PAN AND OPORA
Nature is a dance.
Everything dances alone, everything dances together.
The flute is an open vein,
And the blood is alive, clear, secret, slow and rushing, happy, sad.
The sound is a snake curling, stretching. Poisoned by the beauty, poisoned by itself.
And the exquisite dance of the hands. Often the hands melt, send roots in each other,
Always deeper, like life, like pain.
And the human nature is a dance too.
We dance alone and together, like the rustle of a tree in a forest,
Like the rustle of the forest in a tree.
We dance our life, and life dances us.
And this dance is more, much more than a dance.
***
Your lips, your hands, your shadows,
They should be faithful.
Remember, we are guest in time,
So when people drink, drink with them, laugh with them.
But when you wander in the prisons of the world
Protect your silence.
Silence is the place where you are truly free.
It is more your own than your life.
***
After the grave, after the cypresses,
We try to keep the silence a little further, for a while.
And it is strange,
Because the silence is not only the frozen cry of the dead,
It is alive.
It is the person in our head who thinks, who dreams, who loves.
He is free. He is alive.
Maybe our silence is a lonely language.
Maybe we don't realize that words are simply translations.
And maybe we don't trust foreign languages: the silence of others.
We are simply human.
***
A POET
Your words carry the whole sky,
In their tongue: a poisoned star.
You Muses are painted with the suns of a homeland,
And the harsh colors of borders.
Your words break the sad glass: human, hungry, tired,
The shards spread on paper. The paper is blind.
Your words believe they'll defeat time,
But time rolls also in the gods.
Your words are an old god, the old crutches, blind, deaf.
They defeat themselves.
***
The sunrise
Is for everybody, for nature, for humans.
But, there are people who hardly see the sun.
The people in the cellars of life, where they mine their life,
The cellars of dark light where eyes are lost.
The great blind of the world.
But the river of time flows in everything,
It flows also in the cellars of the world. It will flood them.
The river of time is a giant.
The river of time flows to the inevitable: the journey to humans.
The great blind of the world
Will see for the first time the sunrise.
They will see for the first time the shape of light, the shape of hope.
And the dawn will be for everybody.
***
Your ten years stepped into the sea for the first time.
You feel eternity for the first time.
You feel for the first time nature:
The immense waterfall in a wave, in a fish, in your body.
You feel that nature can give you so much:
Clarity, truth, freedom.
Your ten years don't know that they were sold long ago,
That it was a law of god.
You don't know that whatever is sold, they sell, first of all, its freedom.
Maybe, you'll realize that selling your ten years is a law of people, a cruel law.
Maybe you'll remember the nature inside you,
You'll feel her hands, her infinite hands,
Hold you, gentle as a lullaby, strong as rage.
Your ten years can do so little.
Maybe you'll run back to the sea,
You'll die like a wave, bound and free.
Your ten years came and left like a song. Bound and free.
***
You think history has ended here.
You think you know what the world needs:
Homelands and borders, many borders.
You are young. You know so little.
And it is strange,
Because your young eyes don't see the wind that blows,
You don't feel that the wind blows over all the continents of life.
It will be a storm.
You don't know that history never ends.
That the storm of people will lead to the inevitable:
To humans, the infinite humans.
There are not borders enough for the infinite.
***
At the beach,
Old men, shipwrecks.
They are silent because nothing was left to say.
The sea behind them, the struggle of the waves. But they are still.
Everything hurts them: their sad body, life, the memories.
The only struggle left is the struggle to forget,
To forget everything, to pretend that their foot prints were sand.
To forget all their defeats:
Their silence when they shot people.
The fear, the immense fear to shout.
They believe no longer in anything , except in the path of fate:
The path of the silent to live, defeated.
The path of the fear, to live, defeated.
***
STADIUM STREET
Maybe it was sixty years ago, and maybe, yesterday.
We felt we won, we felt we owned our life.
We didn't know illusions seem so real.
Somewhere, on a wall, I read, like a modern Daniel, the prophecy:
My death. The death of friends. The death of people.
Far away: the sea, the endless sea. It could embrace our death.
The sea has no graves.
And beneath us: the earth, the earth full of graves.
One day, people will walk over the earth, over our graves,
In the journey to the inevitable: to humans.
Humans own their life.
***
You come from far away, from the first wars of the first tribes,
And you bequeath the laws of hate, the religion of fear, of death,
The terrible treasure, to your children.
The hate and the fear blind you, the iron mask on your eyes.
You don't see that the tribes took the first step to the inevitable:
The path of the human.
Maybe, one day, your children will bequeath their children a more gentle treasure:
The laws of the human, the religion of life.
STATUES IN THE PLAZAS
Someone molded their face,
One face out of the hundred faces a man has.
He molded the hands, two hands out of the hundred hands a man has.
So, he molded the prison of their face, of their hands.
Their eyes, the eternal open eyes, see,
They know the joy of seeing, and the terrible pain of seeing,
But only the rain cries in their gaze.
They see, but we forget how to see them.
They are the great invisibles.
They are some of the invisible of the world
Because hunger, loneliness, pain are a magic potion.
They make people invisible.
***
We speak about freedom so much,
And we forget that the needs of humans
Come before, much before freedom.
Because whoever sells in the market his life, his hands, his mind, in order to live,
Sells first of all his freedom.
They have to rage, the great human rage,
They have to siege all the markets of the world.
They have to take back their life, their hands, their minds.
And then, speaking of freedom is useless.
The person in their head, in their hands, in their life, is free.
***
We sell our life in all the markets of the world,
In order to become rich.
And we sell our body, our soul.
All that's left are our shadows.
Shadows are worth little.
Shadows own nothing, not even their life.
It is a world of shadows.
The shadows write the history of shadows.
But time flows everywhere, also in the time of the shadows,
It shatters them, it makes them old.
Maybe, one day,
We'll send the shadows to where they belong:
To the shadows.
We'll rise on our feet, the immense human feet.
Maybe, one day, we'll close the markets where they sell people.
We'll write the history of humans.
***
The holy prophets used secret meaning beneath their words,
So, each one has his own prophecy.
Some believe that besides holy Mary and holy Christ,
There is a third holiness: themselves.
Some believe that holiness is beyond bad and good, fear and logic.
We need other prophets.
They should speak clearly, they should say clearly what is holy.
We need other prophets:
The people, utterly un-miraculous, and their story: the miraculous journey to human.
They know that being human is the only holy thing.
They know that this human is not beyond the laws of humans.
Beyond the laws of humans
There are only the laws of humans.
***
The father, the mother, the son.
Another holy family.
They walk together slowly, time follows them.
Each foot print carves on earth the path of the strong.
They step on shadows of people.
One day, these shadows, these shadows of people,
Will rise from the ground
On the immense feet of a shadow.
Their foot prints will carve another path:
The path to human.
Some paths change the map of the world, forever.
***
You wake up with the birds,
Your wings: nineteen years old.
You sell your hands, your life, in all the markets of the world,
In order to be rich.
But, you grow old and hungry.
You don't realize that whoever sells his life, has nothing else to sell.
Even the soul is worth little,
And the bread of hunger is cruel.
***
The war has killed both:
Your courage and your soul.
And yet, they send you to the war again.
You didn't rage.
You believed that the strong of the world were a shield,
They'll protect you.
You didn't know that the only thing they'll protect was themselves.
You were defeated, but not the strong ones.
They protected themselves.
You didn't rage.
And now, old, your lungs and your life bleed.
You don't realize that the person in your head was once free.
You don't realize that this person wouldn't have shot people at the wall,
People he didn't know, people he had to hate.
He would have raged.
You don't realize that you lament this person,
The only holy thing you ever had.
You don't realize that this person missed you. Always.
***
You dream, and your dream is a poet.
You walk hand in hand with the Muses,
And all around you, your homeland: Gold.
But when you wake up, the light is dark,
And the gold is gone.
You have to wake up again. To see clearly.
To feel the people of the world as close as pain, as close as love.
To feel that those people are the only homeland,
The only gold,
And the gold is everywhere.
***
We meet here, in this unholy abyss.
We blame fate, we blame the strong ones of the world.
We don't realize
That we let them drop us in, one by one.
We don't realize that we didn't rage, all of us, for each human who was shattered.
We knew we are many, that our rage could have a million mouths.
And yet, we were silent.
We let them drop us in, one by one,
And each time we thought we were saved,
But, our turn came. We are alone.
***
There are people who are invisible They are too silent.
We don't see them.
We don't know that life may hurt , may bleed, utterly silent.
From people whose life bleeds you can expect anything,
And their silence may go far, much further than what we imagine.
Among us, there are people whose life is pain,
Because hunger is pain, and old rage, and loneliness.
And yet, they are silent.
They are the great mute of the world.
The silence of the mute is immense.
Storm look for such silences.
***
The orators, the demagogues:
'Your great gods',' Your sacred borders', 'Your great Alexander's'
Words that grew old.
The people, conquerors and conquered,
Are the only homeland, a homeland without beginning, without end.
They are the Iliad, they are Gilgamesh,
And they are humans, daily, infinite.
They know what great is, what holy is.
***
THE CONCENTRATION CAMP
They cuffed our hands, and they cuffed us inside always more.
They counted us, they weighed our life- it was heavy.
Little by little we grow numb: our cuffed hands,
The hands of our mother, the infinite hands, tidying our suitcase.
In the camp: our friends,
And others who committed the crimes of the century:
Looting the bodies of love, looting the hunger,
As if the weight of our struggle was at least as the weight of looting.
Our hands are cuffed,
But the person in our head is free.
He knows the true weight of our struggle, of our life.
He is not numb. He hopes.
***
Dawn.
Everything is ready for the eternal cycle,
But everything seems still.
The light, the sky, the wind.
It could be the land of gods,
But it is the land of men
Who hold the sky high, higher than a human,
Who shoot the wind, the free wind, like a bird.
Who keep the dawn still.
They don't know that time flows in everything,
It shatters the stillness.
It shatters those who believe in stillness.
One day, the eternal cycle will continue to roll,
The sky will come low, it will be the height of a human,
The wind will continue to blow, bound and free, in all the continents of life.
And the dawn will come when it should. It will be for everybody.
***
THE FIRST OF MAY 1944
It was the first of May.
The light outside and inside you: like a white washed home.
You were not alone, there were many,
And you felt that whoever you were, whoever the people were,
They were the race of humans.
You didn't come like someone condemned to death,
You came like a lover.
You loved life, you loved the white washed day, the way one loves the clear water
In the thighs of a woman.
But the wall was in front of you:
The faces that were a wall, the guns that were a wall,
They were the borders of the world.
Maybe you are buried somewhere else,
But you are buried here, in this wall, in this first of May.
Anyway, memory has no graves.
***
Everything is a lesson: the past, the now,
Your tribe, the immense mother.
Maybe you belong to the tribe that travelled to humans. The infinite river.
Maybe you belong to the tribe that remained behind:
Hunting people, gathering cages.
You graze with the dinosaurs, there is an ape, a gorilla. They groan
In the language of groaning, blood drips from their voice.
The coins in your pockets are bones. The bones of beasts, the bones of the tribe.
Carnivores were in fashion.
This tribe will vanish, it will carry you: a rivulet, into the big river.
Everything is a lesson, and history is everywhere.
***
It is a difficult century,
But nothing comes from the nothing, nothing goes to the nothing.
Maybe you live as if the yesterday and the tomorrow don't exist,
As if history didn't exist, as if the journey to humans didn't exist.
Maybe you feel you can sell lives, sell deaths in the 'now',
And nothing will happen.
It is a fatal mistake.
History will revenge you. It did it before:
The ancient tribe who were men hunters, death gatherers, died.
Maybe they didn't discover what remorse is.
Maybe they didn't feel that everything is a journey to life, even though we die.
Maybe they didn't know that we don't grieve for what passed,
But for the past still yet to pass.
Maybe you came from the tribe of death, and you follow them to death.
You shout: fear me. But the dead don't fear.
Your hand, the killer, looks almost human, when you hold it at your head.
The last bullet.
History was the bullet, and it was your hand.
***
Around us: the fastest runners of the world.
People run to all the markets of the world. They have to be on time.
Time is money, and selling a human is money.
They don't know they are not free, that the running imprisons them.
They seem as if they were running from their shadows,
They don't see how the shadow is always in front of them,
Like the ones who die. It is a world of shadows.
Maybe once, they were different.
They were the fastest runners to love, to a sunrise.
They don't realize they lament, each moment, the other runner.
He was beautiful. He was free.
They don't realize that the other runner misses them, for so long.
***
TO RUMELI
Mother of humans, mother of rebels,
Mother of legends that were true,
Mother of truths.
You came from very far,
From the first step of the first tribe.
The step was a struggle. It was free.
You came from very far.
From the first river that flowed through you, bound and free.
Rivers know the way to the sea. To the endless.
You came from very far.
I see your ancient wound, and the dead in your smile:
A child, a man, a dreamer.
The dream of a man weighs much.
***
TO BELOIANNIS ( A LEGENDARY PARTISAN WHO WAS SHOT)
You go on, your soles till your shoes, your shoes till the earth.
You come through the ghetto, the barrio the slums, to the wall.
Your cuffed hands, the hands that knew how to love.
You are not tall, and yet, your eyes are the height of light,
The height of a human.
A hand and a bullet found your life,
They burned the bridges around you: your name.
And yet, our song walks over the burned bridges, towards you, always more.
It sings your legend. Legends sail their wild ships under the burned bridges.
Legends have no grave.
***
Children know so little.
They don't weep, they cry.
They don't know that the true weeping will come later.
And when the time is right,
We remove their wings,
And they have to try to fly.
When they grow, they feel that someone holds their childhood to ransom.
No one knows how to live less eternal.
***
LAMBRAKIS ( A LEGEND OF FREEDOM, A TRUE LEGEND, THAT WAS SHOT)
People with masks and without masks shot you.
Who will be the witness when you are too clean to see.
You knew who will shoot you and why,
But the person in your head was free.
He saw the prisoner in a smile, in fear.
People with masks and without masks buried your dream.
The great grave diggers of the world.
But the people, the people who are the past and the future
Remember.
We make history with whatever we do, living, loving, dreaming,
But some dreams are a mother,
They bear us.
***
THE UNKNOWN CRIME
(SOME UNKNOWN PEOPLE IN VOLOS, WROTE ON THE COMMON GRAVE OF PARTISAN SHOT BY THE GERMANS "WELL DONE")
The ones who poisoned the grave, were not one or two,
They were many.
It was noon time; the thousand eyes of the sun.
On the street of time there were people.
No one saw them.
They poisoned the grave like a man with thousand hells in his lips.
They wrote "well done".
Who will be your witness when your friends are blind,
When they forget, as if the past were blind.
Who will be your witness when your friends are dead.
Who will be your witness when you are too clear to see.
But history is a witness. It sees. It remembers.
It sees the dragon squatting by the grave.
It sees the truth of hell.
It knows the hell of truth.
***
We came from very far.
The pyramids, the sphinxes,
The dreams rolling in the sand, in the maddened wind,
We learned how to write our dreams.
We gave history our story:
We gave her our loss, our sadness, our dreams.
Whatever we do, we are a story teller,
The best story, the most exquisite.
***
The city is a dragon squatting by the river.
It sells people, it buys people.
It gives life and it takes it.
We stay until time comes to pass.
Dreams roam between truth and untruth.
And everything moves towards the end.
Everything moves towards a beginning.
And the dragon drinks the river like blood.
Everything moves towards the end.
***
TO LEANDROS PILENAKIS
The person in your head is human. A wingless bird,
Yet, birds fly through him, smugglers of borders, smugglers of dream.
He loves to imagine a face, a moment, in an hour that doesn't exist.
He loves the mystery of what didn't happen.
He feels how fantasy and life play together, always.
He rules fantasy and it rules him.
They are lovers. Bound and free as love.
***
TO IRO ARGIRAKIS
Tenderness is a gift,
And kindness is a gift.
It needs strength to give such gifts,
And strangely,
These delicate gifts give strength to people.
Gentle Iro,
You give strength to people,
The strength to continue the journey to human,
Always more, always deeper.
***
Your hair, like a raven's wings.
Life plucked your feathers, one by one,
And you have still to try to fly.
You grew old, and it is harsh.
You are a wingless bird,
And you have still to fly.
***
I love her face, when certain moods move in.
There is some winter-sun in her winter lips.
She moves through me, she moves in my skin.
There is some winter-sun in my skin.
There is so little sun left.
Time grows cold in our body,
And her winter sun in my winter sun
Is a lover, a mother,
A child who trembles.
***
The bird of dawn shines and cracks.
The wind, light as a thief.
You are at the borders of the world,
You are the borders of your world.
Little by little, and all at once, you realize
That the only way to erase these borders,
Is to make your soul bigger,
To make your dream bigger,
The infinite dream of a human. He is free.
***
You are the man for whom no god waits.
You are the man for whom this century waits.
You have the Cain Mark, but you don't mind.
The century needs you.
Killing your brothers is in fashion.
There are more, much more Cain-s than what we imagine. The Mark of death.
But, time continues to flow,
The centuries change, and the fashions change.
One day, your hand when it points at your head,
Will be almost human. The last bullet.
***
You are walking the road of hate.
Warning signs follow you up to the depth of the abyss.
You don't see them.
You feel no premonition in the shadows that walk in front of you,
Like the dying.
You don't see the demon howling with pain and crawling on your feet.
You don't know that hate is a pirate. It loots the eyes.
You don't know you are as blind as pain, as blind as death.
***
The light was blinding,
Full of gods, of ghosts, of truth.
This light, this blinding light,
Stole your path.
You don't know where to go.
There are ghosts crawling over you, howling their visions.
You fear the ghosts.
And there are gods in your head.
They are fearsome, they may be cruel.
You fear the gods.
Maybe you fear the truth too. It may be sad. It may bleed.
Maybe you'll choose the path you feel closer, as close as your truth. The sad path.
We are sad people,
And sadness is human.
***
You send people to death.
You burn them with guns and without guns.
You say you don't have free will,
So, you are not guilty.
Maybe you are a machine of death.
But people build machines and destroy them.
One day, time will be right, and the people will destroy you.
They'll send you to another kind of hell:
The hell of machines.
The hell where machines burn each other. The immense furnace
Your metal body, melting, will howl like the young boy you've burned,
And no one will be guilty.
***
CAIN AND HABEL
One son is a tiller.
He has the hands of a tiller, the immense hands.
The other son is a wanderer,
He follows his sheep,
He follows his shadows, like pain, like death.
He calls his father, his mother,
But they are deaf in the shadows. They are blind.
The shadows are not blind.
He kills his brother,
Deaf and blind in his shadows,
Deaf and blind as envy. Envy is pain.
The shadows were not blind. They saw.
They remained on his face.
Whenever we kill someone, the shadows remain on our face.
Shadows are not what we think they are.
They are faithful. They are a witness.
***
A human stands by the Eastern wall.
He raises his hands, the infinite hands of a human,
He blesses life, he blesses the people,
And the Eastern wall is the Human.
The sacred wall.
***
People came into my songs, like a storm.
They had the shape of a cry, sands cry in the storm. The shape of the endless wind.
My life flashed before my eyes. The quiet desert.
I never knew how much I missed the people, the people I didn't know.
I never knew that they missed me.
***
We let love in.
The door was open, just a crack, but it was enough.
And the dream of love, is another kind of love.
We are love lovers.
We are simply human.
***
All the stories will come out
After we're gone.
Maybe they'll see us in a different way.
The people we killed, and then we mopped the tears from their dead face.
Maybe, in certain angles, in certain directions of light,
We were handsome.
Maybe the world will say 'fare well',
But, we doubt it.
History has the memory of stone.
***
We come from very far,
From the first cave of the first man.
We draw on the walls of the cave, the bleeding cave, the black cave,
The beasts that we kill and that kill us.
Maybe, we are human now,
But each one has a cave inside him,
And the beasts he doesn't dare mention, on its walls.
Some artists come from very far, from wild ages.
They draw their caves, they draw their beasts on the walls.
The great naked of the world.
***
At times, love come too late.
You knock on the door,
But, my beloved, you and i
Are no longer in.
There are no longer bridges to build and to burn.
There are no longer bridges to measure the separations.
There was separation in everything, from the start,
Even in your gaze, heavy, moist like a summer evening,
In your hand that rose and then, came down.
***
Poets are made weak by too many visions.
They dream until they don't resist it anymore,
Because they know that the dreams will remain dreams.
Maybe they dream of love, the love of gods.
They forget that they created the gods, in the myths, in the songs.
That they gave them the dream of passion.
***
Women come from very far.
Their face; lit and dark,
The shadows dangle, hairy, long,
Blood running between their thighs.
We don't see it. Love is a thief of eyes.
We don't see that inside each woman, somewhere deep,
There is the first cave of loving,
The first cave where mothers keep the young,
Like a belly of love.
***
I see your sea-side eyes,
I see your ancient wound.
Your lips: the color of a strange flower:
Bloody, wild, free.
You love me like a quiet sea-side, like an ancient wound,
Like a flower bloody, wild, free.
Your love is simply human.
***
You come like a lover of love, like a human.
You say: give me your loss, give me your sadness.
You say: I am sorry for all the things I couldn't love.
I am sorry for all the bridges that were burned,
The separations in each gaze, in each moment.
You walk over the burned bridges towards me, always more.
***
The sorrows of a poet:
Some bought, some borrowed, some stolen,
Because poets are not always honest,
And because one sorrow is not enough.
We are sad people, we want to hear our sadness in the songs,
And one sadness is not enough,
Not enough for everybody.
***
IN HOSPITAL FOR TERMINAL PATIENTS
Here, the only witness, the only judge, is pain.
The only mercy- the dying.
It is strange,
Pain matures under the sun, the exquisite sun,
Like a fruit,
A carnivorous fruit that we eat and that eats us.
Here, among the hundred mouths of a cry, you hear the silence,
And life is surreal, a canvass of a mad painter.
***
SOLDIERS IN THE DESERT
The sun hates us, and we hate the sun.
The only gift of the desert is the wild sand, the wild wind,
That make us wilder,
And the thirst and the hunger that dig graves in our mouth.
In the desert your footprints are sand, they don't exist,
You don't exist.
The desert is a foreigner, the dreams here are foreign, so we have no dreams.
And we share the desert
With the insect, with the passion of lizards,
And with the white bones of the dead, with broken hands that knew how to love.
They remained unburied, like memories.
It is dawn,
The first sun rays feel cold,
They bring the fog with them, the immense fog.
Everything drinks the white vapors.
Dawn is a mother.
***
Come with me here, by the wall.
You'll see the most beautiful illusion,
That tonight will be shot.
The most exquisite illusion:
That the soul exists. That the soul is for everybody.
***
Jerusalem,
The exquisite woman.
You are holy. You are unholy.
On top of the mountain, your gaze travels high.
It is pure. It has clear water in it.
And down below, at your feet, the pain.
There are lepers, there are demons crawling, howling their pain,
There is the woman of love from Jericho, there are Magdalene-s.
And I don't know what is holy, what is unholy,
Your gaze, the pain at your feet.
***
When you part,
Tell no one
Of the signs of the bullets in my chest,
Of the wall in my eyes.
Remember only how much I loved life,
Remember that, at times, 'traitor' is a name of honor, a medal.
***
Before us,
Many tribes passed in this land.
They loved it. They felt it is beautiful.
We owe these tribes much.
We owe them the beauty around us.
All the tribes that passed here, passed inside us.
We see the past, and it sees us.
***
We don't want to wake up,
Because our dreams forgive us,
And because we fear.
We fear the pain of seeing,
The pain of feeling what we saw.
Maybe pain forgives nothing,
But also fear doesn't forgive. It is cruel.
And it is a prison, the worst prison: our own.
And the sleep continues.
***
The world is a stranger. There are borders everywhere.
There are barbed wires that pierce the trespassers:
The flight of the birds, the migrating Buffalos,
The people who come from the places where the world ended.
It is sad,
Because there are borders also inside us, and barbed wires of fear,
Even in our hands, the infinite hands of a human.
We fear the hand-shake, and it fears us.
***
In the shop window:
Dolls. They are sad, they are wax. They are lit.
And inside them, our whole childhood glows and burns at the same time,
Slowly.
Always more, always deeper.
***
The mother-land,
Conquered, imprisoned, burned, hanged, shot.
Mother,
I keep you in my silence.
You are free in my silence.
And remember,
Gods die, and the soldiers of god,
But not the people.
The people full of past, the people full of future.
Time is made of such people.
The endless is made of such people.
***
GREECE- THE MOTHER LAND, AFTER THE WAR
Mother,
The cypresses call you,
They were always faithful, they guarded your dead.
Mother,
Your shadows are empty shadow now, empty among all the emptiness,
And your shadows are close, as close as pain, as close as death.
You were betrayed, and you betrayed us.
You didn't remind us that nothing comes from the nothing,
That a man has to fight in order to be human.
You didn't remind us
Our ancient tribes, the ancient struggle to be human.
That human was free.
***
Necessity is a mother.
It bears our hands, the person in our head, the person in our eyes,
And it bore all the tribes that we were, and we are.
We feel
That there are the hands, the brains, the eyes of a human
Are in whatever we eat.
We are not cannibals, we are simply men, eating the fruit of man.
And we are always
Child of necessity,
Child of the journey to human, the endless journey.
***
There are many match-makers:
Necessity, the need of the body of love to love,
The need of the belly of love to be full of love,
The need of man to be family:
People to live with, to work with, to dream with, to love,
To travel with towards the human always more.
There are many match-makers,
But only one family: the family of humans.
***
Mountains are alive; the earth is alive and the stones.
Maybe the mountain hurts when it bears the marbles.
We should build less temples, less churches.
We can pray on the top of the mountain.
It will be the purest prayer,
Because the mountain, nature will pray with us.
Beyond the prayer of nature
There is only the prayer of nature.
***
People dance for the first of May,
Simple people, workers, peasants.
They dance folk dances. Folk dances weigh much.
The people dance, clear as glass, fragile as glass,
And the strong of earth, the glass in their eyes is armored,
It blinks danger.
So, death and May dance together.
But, time flows in everything,
And the journey of history flows in the people.
One day, May will dance with people, with life,
They'll dance the folk dances.
Folk dances weigh much.
***
At the table: my nineteen years.
You were inside me, always.
I dreamed your dreams, I loved what you loved, I sang your songs,
You were in all my prisons, by all the walls where people were shot.
You are my best song.
You regretted nothing.
***
At the table: the child that I was.
I breathe your breath, the moist, clear breath of a child.
I hold your hands, they are light and heavy as love.
You were a mother,
You bore me, each moment, each day, always better.
***
You sold your life to someone in order to get the pouch of coins,
And now you own nothing,
Maybe you own still hope.
Owners come and go,
And you hope that time will flow through the sons,
They'll be more human.
You don't know that time is a river,
At times, it rolls wildly, at times it is quiet water.
And the journey to humans is a river.
***
MONOLOGUE OF GREECE
I am light.
When they take whatever you have,
You are light. You hardly exist.
All that's left is a dream and hope,
I need now hope more than ever.
I need time to choose my hang-man,
I need time to choose the walls
Where they'll shoot people, good people, honest people.
The birds are silent. They are not birds of pray.
They don't carry the seasons anymore.
I forget them and I miss them at the same time.
Countries are like people: simply human.
***
GREECE CONQUERED
Noble families, proud, ancient,
Came from the four winds,
They conquered you.
People say that it is them who make history,
They don't realize that it is the people who make history,
The people full of past.
The past is a mother,
It bears them, the history makers.
***
TO GREECE
You are free in your silence,
You are free to look for freedom in the prisons,
You look for freedom in your life,
But your life was sold in all the markets of the world.
It is the theatre of the absurd:
A ruler who rules nothing, not even himself.
***
Some call the ones who lie, who betray :pigs.
They offend the pigs.
The pigs are wise. They are innocent. They are a friend.
They love the mud like a child with his first boots.
We feed them so much, in order to feed ourselves,
So, their fat is innocent.
It is us who betray: we kill them with a knife in their cry.
***
People sell their lives to all the gods of the world,
In order to feel safe.
In front of the churches, the pain roll: the people,
They howl: paradise.
They don't know that the only paradise they'll ever have,
The best thing they'll ever have was their life.
But, they sold it.
***
GREECE
The wind beats everything.
On the road: the crosses: two wooden wings,
Your ancient wound.
You breathe the smoke in the air: the crusaders
You breathe the pain each step leaves in your body.
Maybe you are asleep, you feel it is all a dream.
Maybe it is time to wake up,
To shout: I rule this land.
To shout: the crusaders are guests in time, guests in history.
Nothing more.
***
TO VARNALIS: IMITATIONS
Nothing comes from the nothing, nothing goes to the nothing.
Artists drew their secret beasts on the caves.
Artists drew the life of stars and the life of humans on stone.
They were mothers.
Later, artists drew on paper
Their secret beasts, the caves inside them.
Whatever was to be said, was said,
But there are some angles where things seem different,
Like drawing the river of time on a canvass. It is still.
We hold the water in our hands, we catch the fish of time: the moments.
Artists need mothers in order to grow,
And in order to leave them.
There are separations in everything,
Even in the hands of a mother rising to touch your face,
And coming down.
***
They call the traitors: dogs.
They offend the dogs.
Dogs are faithful, they never betray,
And they know how to love.
It is time to find another name for the traitors:
A machine of death.
Maybe they steal the soul of the machine,
And its iron fist: the guns.
So, this name is cut on their measures.
***
The speaker speaks,
And around him: people listen.
They don't know how little he is without the platform.
They don't realize how little his words are,
They shout whatever he read,
As if the person in his head forgot how to think.
These words weigh little.
***
You sell your life,
And then you drink and dance as if nothing happened.
You are a Dionysus, an old sad drunkard,
You are a Cyclopes, your only eye stolen by the wine.
You dance, your belly naked, and your belly button tied to your step mother,
The harsh step mother: the owner, the one who bought you.
Maybe you drink because you feel that something happened,
That when you sell your life you own nothing,
That even the soul is worth little . There is no market for souls.
***
Whoever we are, our blood is red,
Even when someone paints it blue.
The blood is the most precious thing we have, it is life,
And yet, they sell it in wars and at all the walls of the world.
Maybe, there is a hell for blue bloods,
A hell and a wall where demons crawl and howl their pain,
A wall where they shoot each other,
And the blood flows red,
They hold their wound, like the boy they shot this morning.
And the hand, when it holds the wound, seems almost human.
***
People love their motherland.
It is their childhood, it is their youth.
But people grow, they see always more.
Motherlands are painted with borders.
So, one country is not enough for all the people of the world.
The people are enough for all the people of the world.
They are a mother. An infinite mother.
***
We love our motherland.
It is our childhood, it is our youth.
But, we grow,
Our soul grows bigger,
Our dreams grow bigger.
There is no border that is enough.
***
In front of you: the biggest gate of the world:
Dachau, Mathausen, death.
Behind you:
Bodies raped, hanged burned.
Behind you: people ask who you are,
They are soldiers of god.
Protect your silence. You are free in your silence.
Don't say: I am a Jew.
Don't say: I loved all the people.
Don't say: after all, there is only one god.
Betray everything, with a mask or without.
Keep your wife and your child that were hanged, that were burned,
In your silence.
Remember: they are wild monsters,
Let your silence be wild,
You are free in your silence,
Shoot them in your silence,
Cry in your silence, because you are human. A human Jew.
***
People are not bears, they don't hibernate in winter,
But, strangely, some hibernate for years, for ages.
They live sleeping, they love sleeping, they shoot people at the wall, sleeping
They protect themselves from the pain of seeing, from the pain of living,
They protect themselves from the terrible wall.
They don't realize the wall will sleep in their sleep, will dream in their dreams.
They don't know that history will protect them from nothing.
Maybe, they'll wake up before the long sleep,
Maybe they'll remember that once they were alive,
Maybe they'll cry the wall that killed them.
Maybe their hand raised to touch the tears will be almost human.
***
It would be nice to be young
And have in our head an old person.
We'll know so much, we'll understand so much,
We'll love more, deeper,
Maybe we would be better humans.
Of course, the old have their own vices,
And the fear of death breathing in their breath.
So, it is not a good bargain.
***
The girl was beautiful.
Her hair: a raven's wing.
Her lips had a strange color: shy, wild.
She kept her body of love for a husband, but the body of love is impatient.
She allowed a lover to have it ,
And then, she allowed him to chase her away.
After all, she was guilty.
Pretty girl,
Your raven wing is not enough to fly somewhere in the deep future,
Or even to the deep past.
To know that the body of love when it loves,
Is alive, more than ever.
That it knows how to fly.
***
My good enemies are silent,
There is too much earth in their mouth.
And the living enemies:
Teachers of the holy gold, of the holy hunger for gold,
They left me, a man on a tight rope:
At time I am human, the old human I know,
And at times I fall, I crawl like an animal in pain.
I hold my hunger, my golden hunger,in my pain.
And everything is a prison:
The tight rope, the gold, the hunger, the pain crawling inside me.
***
A man died. A simple man.
I stand by his grave.
Someone says: he didn't live big things,
Because he made the big things small.
But, I grew old, I no longer know
What is really big, what is really small.
Is a dream, one dream, divided to the infinite of people,
Big or small.
Is a gaze, heavy and moist like a summer evening,
And all the separations inside it,
Big or small.
***
VARNALIS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I wanted to begin again the journey to human. A human is free.
I wanted to travel with others.
But, my steps were strangulated, always more,
And the brave ones were afraid, always more.
School blinded me,
But life, the harsh century,
And the forbidden books
Were good eye-glasses.
I learned that love doesn't exist,
That kindness was a cureless disease.
I was afraid,
But, the more I feared, the more I dared.
I was a frightened hero.
I was alone.
I spoke to myself, maybe in order to remember that I exist.
They caught me.
I lay down, my life bled,
But my eyes were open,
They saw you, Greece,
Sad Greece, betrayed and betraying.
When I die,
Throw me into the sea. The sea is free.
The sea has no graves.
***
They were pupils in the schools of betrayal, and then, students, teachers.
They feared freedom. It was too heavy, too immense.
They feared the people, the simple people, the honest people,
They had too much truth. They were dangerous.
Makriani,
Your wound came from very far,
From the tribes who bought and sold people,
And your wound is here, now.
The past traveled back to you. It is here, now.
And everything bleeds in your wound.
***
You want to change your country, your century.
You don't know that wherever you go, you simply change the prison.
You don't know that the market where they sell people
Began long ago. The ancient tribes.
So, the past is not a solution.
You don't know that you are a prisoner, as long as your back hurt you
From so much bowing. Bowing is a prison.
But, there is hope.
Maybe, one day, you'll rise on your feet, the immense feet of a man,
You'll be a new 'Homo Erectus', or even more, you'll be human.
They may shoot you for such a crime. Remember, the wall doesn't bow.
***
The big ones need a big gate.
Up to the threshold: death and oblivion.
Inside: the endless memory,
The eternal marbles of hungry gods. Gods are always hungry.
And you, Mother, you bow to the marbles, the hungry marbles.
Outside:
The harsh century.
People who pluck the wings of birds, of dreams.
People who torture the truth.
People who rape girls, still warm from their mothers' lap.
And the blood of the people is everywhere. It is cheap. It's worth nothing.
And you, Mother land
That came from our holy bones,
You were betrayed with masks and without,
And you betrayed.
You were like the famous statue:
You saw nothing, you heard nothing, you said nothing.
***
People throw strange thing in the trash:
The eyes of someone, partner in a crime. They didn't want witnesses.
The soul of a betrayer. Souls betray too much.
A book, the story of gold, from the first greed ever.
So, the hands of the scavenger, the black nails, the black sweat,
Are clean, much cleaner than the trash they gather.
***
Your body left you,
Before the longings left.
Everything you loved abandoned you,
And you abandoned yourself.
You still miss the dawn.
Sad man,
You don't know that the longing for the dawn.
Is the only road to the dawn,
This, and the eyes that remember how to see.
They know that the dawn is for everybody.
***
The road to human, to truth is not easy.
It is full of dead bodies.
Everywhere the same tribes: the rulers,
The killers who were dead deep inside long ago, and the killed.
But, you proceed fast,
You are in a hurry to catch the future.
And suddenly, you feel alone,
You realize that you went backwards, or that the past followed you,
And the actions, more than any confession, confess the pain, confess the truth.
Now, you can go nowhere anymore. You are maimed.
You lost your feet. You walked over too many dead.
***
Your shadow matured. It melts in the city of the dead.
You grew old
Waiting for the train to humans to arrive.
You were free in your hope.
You loved the truth and she loved you.
It was a serious crime.
It was midnight. The last station. You were shot.
Now, among the heaps of bones,
Don't look for you own.
Bones have no name, they have all the names, like life.
***
You sell your hands, and you don't own them anymore, they own you,
And the buyer owns them.
You believe that whatever is big in the world, whatever is beautiful,
Your owner made, your owner owns.
One day, when it's time,
You'll take your hands back.
You'll stand in front of yourself,
Owner of yourself, owner of your life.
You'll realize that the people are the past, the people are the future.
They are eternal.
You'll realize that the infinite of people
Created whatever is big in the world, whatever is beautiful.
They are the artist. They are the owner.
***
The sun: fire.
It burns the sands, the breath, the eyes.
Today, the crusaders came, the soldiers of god.
Today, they conquered the land,
And they carried along the Spanish Inquisition.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition, yet, it comes.
On the ground: the demons crawl and howl their pain:
Mothers, children, old men.
On the columns: the crucified. They are always more silent.
Crosses make you holy.
On the trees: the ones who were hanged. Maybe they are holy too.
It is a festival of death. It is a holy festival.
And the festival continues, the holiness continues.
Holiness is a soldier of god.
***
Nothing begins from the nothing.
There are people who were never loved,
So, they don't know how to love.
They were never at home in their home,
So, they are homeless forever.
No one ever forgave them,
So, they don't know how to forgive.
They say that they keep everything in their silence:
The loveless life, the homeless home, the forgiving.
Their silence is a cry that never left their mouth.
Storms wait for such silences.
***
TO THE GREEK PEOPLE
One day,
Local and foreign pagans come,
They conquer your land.
So, now you have to feed two huge mouths.
Maybe the pagan gods are like the other gods:
Hungry, omnivorous.
You were betrayed, and you betrayed.
You betrayed even yourself:
You sold the human full of past, full of future,
Cheaply. Almost for nothing.
So, you own nothing, not even your life,
But you own your death.
You miss the human that you were,
He was beautiful, he was free,
And you don't know how much he misses you.
***
There are the laws of nature:
The cycle of the sun,
The rivers flowing to the sea.
And there are the laws of history, of humans:
Life going always further than what it knows,
It goes to the human, always more, always better.
Beyond the laws of nature
There are only the laws of nature.
Beyond the laws of humans,
There are only the laws of humans.
***
THE MYTH OF HERCULES
Youth was a holy, unholy fire.
It was riding down the hill without reins, without thought.
The future, the past, didn't exist, only the road.
In my mind, the sins of the body of love were holy.
The now was a motion without purpose,
And everything was purpose: love, adventure.
I regret nothing except the things I didn't do,
The loves I didn't love, the sins I didn't sin.
My ashes may be virtuous, they may be sinners.
But, there is no past, no future,
So, it doesn't matter.
***
In front of you, there is only death.
Whatever you lived was your life and your dying.
It was a harsh century.
You betrayed and you were betrayed,
And most of all, you betrayed yourself, which hurts even more.
You try to forget,
But memory can be stubborn, A mule.
And you ride this mule each day to sadness.
It is a pity.
Whatever you were, you were human.
Don't let the mule forget it.
***
You sell your life, in order to save yourself,
So, you own nothing, your land, your beliefs.
You sell yourself so deeply, so utterly,
That you are ready to kill, if need be,
You are ready to die for those who bought you.
You don't see how these ones, the owners
Crucify people, burn them in all the pyres of the world.
You don't realize how vulnerable you are,
You don't know that the ones who bought you,
Have a cross, a pyre ready for you.
People who buy and sell lives, don't believe in life.
They believe in the pouch of gold, they believe in death.
Maybe, one day, when the need comes,
The world will crucify them,
But, for sure, they'll crucify you before,
You'll be worth little.
Maybe you'll remember, a moment before the nails, or even a moment after,
That you had once a life,
That it was the best thing you ever had.
***
They weave your shrouds:
The hunger, the pain, the ones who were shot.
You work in hell, and you work for hell.
Your homeland, your mother, is a step mother.
She betrayed you,
The ones who betray someone, somewhere they betray themselves.
You should tear the shrouds,
You should realize there are many mothers;
The people, the dream, the mother who bore you,
And that you are your own mother:
You bear yourself each day, each moment.
You bear the human always more,
And that is the true journey to humans,
This is the journey to your mother land:
The people, the infinite of people.
And somewhere deep,
Remember the mother land of your childhood,
She was beautiful, she was tender, she knew how to love.
***
Feelings are a mystery.
They know us more than we know ourselves,
As if the read on our palm
The line of love, the line of fear, the line of the past, the line of hope,
The line of life,
And they are fast runners,
So, whatever we think,
Feelings were there before,
Ready to play with our thoughts
***
The worst tyrant is ourselves,
And the most difficult to slaughter.
This tyrant is strange.
It may be cruel with us.
It may be gentle with the others.
We try to lose ourselves,
But the tyrant is stubborn. A mule.
We are free nowhere, not even in our silence.
We have no choice. We ride the mule for years, for ages.
We are sad people.
***
I look at the children that are born,
So full of future.
It saddens me,
Because this century is a harsh mother.
But, time does what it should, it moves.
The children will grow.
They may learn how to see, how to understand.
They may be mothers too:
They'll bear themselves, each day more human, each day better.
Bearing yourself is the true journey to human.
Maybe, one day, the century will have no choice.
It will have to follow history,
It will have to follow the laws of a human.
***
We grow old. We hurt everywhere.
Even the night is no refuge:
The terrible insomnia.
It is almost funny:
In a while we'll sleep forever,
And now, we cannot even dose a little.
But the insomnia is stubborn. A donkey.
And we have to ride this donkey until the forever. The sleep.
***
Mules die forever.
There is no resurrection for mules.
It is mercy.
Mules live a harsh life,
They are more slaves than the slaves,
The patient honest mules.
I don't think they would like to begin everything from the beginning.
Among us, there more, many more mules than what we imagine.
***
The wheel turns
And the eternal question is who turns it.
We can do nothing about the wheel.
It will turn whether we understand it or not,
And yet, the thought of the wheel
Was the first step of the first tribe ever, to human.
***
The graves of men is one size: small,
No matter how big they were.
Even the pharaohs in the great pyramids,
Had only a small niche for the body.
But, some people had deep inside a dream:
The dream of a human. The infinite dream.
There is no grave for the infinite.
***
Inside you, hope is empty.
You let the river of time flow through your hope, your pain,
And do nothing.
It is a pity.
You can be free in your hope, you can be human in your hope,
You can step into another river of time .
There are many rivers of time,
A thousand rivers flowing into the big river of time.
***
We sin, and we regret it.
Regret is dangerous,
Because we don't know how to forgive ourselves,
And the forgiveness of others is useless.
So, regret goes far, much further than the sin.
We are sad people.
***
I walk in the crowd.
No one knows me,
But anyway, I also don't know myself.
I walk in the piazzas,
The statues,
The eternal sculptress, the gods of art.
They are dead.
Maybe they had to die in order to be eternal,
In order to be gods.
***
The law protects the one who makes it,
And you, people with the lost breath,
Where will you find your breath.
Remember: breath is the most precious thing you have, it is life.
Where will you find your life.
***
It is a difficult century.
We celebrate no longer the holy festivals.
In order to celebrate them
We have to know what is holy.
We remember the man who was shot,
A man who loved life so much, enough to die for it.
He was the most holy thing we ever knew.
It is a difficult century.
We'll celebrate him in our silence.
We are free in our silence.
***
The bodies of love, when they love, are free.
It is a pity,
Because often, they are not free in the before, in the after,
The gods, the laws are immense walls.
So, we steal from the night whatever we can, whatever freedom,
Love is a great thief .
***
I was a child. I believed in the grow ups. They knew much.
Now, a grown up, I believe in children.
Their eyes know not only how to see,
But also to feel what they see.
They understand much.
***
THE GERMAN OCCUPATION
There are no longer nightingales in the city.
Nightingales don't sing wars.
And even the birds of pray
Kill because of their hunger,
Not because of the hunger to kill.
***
THE GERMAN OCCUPATION
Strangers made us strangers in our land,
So, we are exiles in our land.
It is strange,
In this land, the land of our childhood,
We get lost,
We don't know where to find ourselves.
And it is a pity,
Because we don't feel free even in our silence, in our dreams.
Fear is a cruel prison.
***
People bow to the twelve gods.
They are not pagans.
They bow to the person who created the gods,
He made them bound and free as the sun.
People bowing to a human, bound and free as the sun.
***
On the street of time, I follow the people.
I am wounded whenever they are wounded.
They don't know me, I don't know them.
But our wounds know each other. They feel. Pain feels.
They feel the cross, the nails ready.
They feel the bullet hovering, waiting for the chest.
Inside our wounds we are free.
***
The small town. Adolescence.
She tried to be like the others, yet, she wanted to be visible.
She wanted all the unfeasible-s.
She had the eyes of someone who wants to be loved, heavy and light,
Yet, in her gaze, all the separations were ready.
She wrote poems, the words white like a Japanese mourning.
Death was already there.
And the room, from all the alone, smelled of cypresses,
Of leaves cut from the night.
She wasn't rich.
She didn't have the treasure of tenderness. She didn't have the treasure of those
Who know life is the best thing they'll ever have. They loved life.
She continued for years, maybe for ages.
One day she left.
She wore shoes, but inside the shoes her feet were bare.
Inside the shoes there were stones, there were carnivorous insects.
It was adulthood. Like a sudden war.
At times she won, at times she lost,
And she learned how to love the twilight, the immense twilight,
The shadows mingling with light.
A truce.
***
We sat in the cafe of the sunsets.
Your face: something cut from the sunset.
Your body: half smoke, half burning.
On your skin: the delicate finger prints of the rain.
They glow for a moment, like a jewel, and they're gone. You glow with them.
Your eye lashes; heavy and moist as a gaze. Some people don't see with their eyes.
You carry with you your dead mothers:
Your mother, creased as a stolen bill of money. Your life. Your hope.
In the street: the wall.
The birds of prey in the air : the bullets.
You fall.
The deepest fall .
***
We forget our poems
In a corner of silence,
On white papers,
Naked, cold.
And when we return, after years, maybe ages,
We are different
And the poems are different.
There are separations in everything.
We didn't know how many sunsets can enter our soul,
How many sunsets can enter a poem.
And time flows through the sunsets like a burning river.
***
The wine distillers of sunsets
Pour the sunset in our glass.
Someone will die tonight, of hunger, or at the wall.
Around us: the smoke of lost souls.
We don't know if we exist, if we are smoke,
When everything is void: the souls, the gazes, the hope,
When the mercury is zero.
Someone will die tonight, of hunger, or at the wall.
Death exists.
It is a century of killers.
***
On the street:
The shapes of suffering, of loneliness, of the deserted, walk: people.
On the street, a man stands.
His life, more consumed, more tired than his clothes.
His shoes have tilled the soles for too long.
In his eyes: the terrible pain of seeing. Seeing can make the eyes bleed.
Someone will die before the evening,
He'll lie softly on the street.
He wouldn't be able to close his eyes.
***
Some children are fearless.
At night, they roam, full of sky,
They catch stars, comets in their hands,
And the stamp of the infinite remains on their palms forever.
These children will grow,
But with the stamp of the infinite they don't have many choicces.
They may become the greatest killers ever,
They may become the greatest dreamers ever.
They are marked.
***
We are born little by little,
So, I was a child
Years, maybe centuries ago.
And then, suddenly; a wound,
One day it may be lethal.
Adulthood.
We die the way we are born,
Little by little,
We are adults for years, maybe for ages.
***
Poets love drama.
They wear the terrible symbol: the black hood.
So, they see no one, and no one sees them.
They feel they are the sacred Inquisition of words,
And when a word or even a phrase confess,
They feel holy, pure.
***
Demons, like the angels,
More than the body of sin,
Long for our soul.
There were many who sold their souls to the demons
In the market of souls,
But the only one who buys the body is life.
It needs our eyes, our hands, our feet.
And it is strange,
It walks towards the crimes of the century
And towards the human,
In the same body, in the same feet.
Life is the theatre of absurd.
***
There are mothers
Who were not meant to be mothers.
Maybe they feel that the embrace of a child
Is the greatest strangulate-r ever,
So, they leave
Before they could forgive us,
And we never forget it,
Because we never learn how to forgive ourselves.
***
There are people who are maimed, people we love.
They lost their feet in war, in a mine field of life.
So, they have no choice,
They leave flying,
Light and heavy as an autumn leaf.
Light and heavy as the remnants of a body , the only body left.
***
We don't see young men anymore,
We don't know where they are.
We knock at the darkest door of hell.
The sign: unknown.
We crawl in: the lost in war, the shot at the wall,
They were all there.
They were old.
***
Sculpturing is cruel.
Rocks are hard,
We cannot make them bear their beauty.
We need to have the rocks inside us,
Without them we can do nothing,
And the rocks outside:
We have to pound them with love and hate for years, maybe for ages.
They may bear the beauty,
And they'll bear also us.
You don't realize that when you break a rock,
You break it outside and inside you.
***
Acting is harsh when you are maimed.
Your one eye screams in the dark.
You saw too much, and you lost your eye,
You saw too much, and you grew your eternal silence.
Now, you have to kill the silence. To speak.
You were free in your silence.
***
He was in the hospital for the terminal illness.
On the walls: pictures of the dead.
Soon, he'll hang too on the wall,
Soon, he'll look at the other dead, until the oceans end.
And the thought of such eternity
Hits him like a rock, a piece of sky exploding on his head.
He doesn't want such eternity, but it is too late.
He'll hang on the wall.
***
ANTIGONI
Antigoni rises on her feet,
White, smooth as marble.
The dead surround her,
They hit her, they beat her, the way only the dead can do.
She seemed dead.
A bird white, smooth as marble.
She flew.
***
The street: straight lines, going nnowhere.
The street lights
The blood cells of the night, are indifferent.
He stood there, he shouted:
How can you dream of love,
In these dreamless streets, in these dreamless lights.
At night he continued to shout:
The body is useless. It bears only shadows.
And the shadows ran in front of him, like pain, like dying.
They took him to the mad house.
He was guilty.
He wanted to dream love,
He wanted to love madly.
They took him to the mad house,
They took him and his shadows.
***
All the mothers: the sadness, life, hope,, mercy,
Cried:
Don't inject the poison.
Your fleet of pain will drown in earth,
Slowly, terribly slowly, the way pain does.
Your days will be scavengers,
They'll dance in the trash.
At night, you'll burn,
But your nights are not a hand to give you water,
Only fire.
One day, you may glimpse white ghosts.
They look for you.
They will be there in the most terrible ritual, the most sacred:
The last breath.
You'll die.
Death will leave your eyes: two empty moons.
It will be night. Always.
***
She was beautiful.
Her hair, the color of sunset.
The lips painted with soft foam, the first madness.
She jumped from the children train,
She jumped from the thighs of her home,
Into her own abyss,
Like a sudden massacre.
The strong smell of death. It grew in her silence, always more.
She paid her debt to life at once.
She didn't want to pay the pain, the terrible madness little by little.
She was beautiful.
Her madness was like an animal in pain,
And it was human.
***
He grew among scavengers, so he knew the weight of trash,
The weight of the hands that threw it.
He was arrested for small crimes and for big ones.
His skin was embroidered by the iron fingers of prisons.
One day, I saw him. He said:
I filled my life with crosses, with cemeteries.
His face was looted by a terrible pirate: drugs.
Maybe he died of an over dose,
And maybe the crosses and the cemeteries inside him were too many.
***
He came from the tribe of the hunted: partisans.
They ran over a mine field: they wanted to change the world.
One day, it rained endless autumns,
I was in a cafe like any other: gazes, nameless as the lonely.
I saw him, I remember how he ran,
A refugee from the mine fields of the city, of the gazes.
He spoke. He broke his silence like someone who breaks the shop window of clocks;
An explosion of time.
He said: it rains in my life for too long.
He said: I drown in the face that I see in a puddle.
He said: I drown in the eyes I see in a puddle.
He left.
I remember his hand in my hand:
The hand of a tired gladiator, defeated.
They told me he died in the street. Maybe he drowned in his face.
***
Her body; scarred with the claws of ancient gods: the gods of death.
When she raised her hands, they were mingled with the sunset.
The empty sea in her eyes.
She could stand no longer,
She lay at the feet of the gods of death.
She was young, almost a child,
But she sobbed like the old: tears silent, final.
***
The sunrise sows the red seeds.
The mother of mercy
Weaves a delicate cloth to cover your body.
You are so beautiful in this cloth.
All night
You were hunted by mad warriors, the soldiers of god,
The moon was an empty dome.
They found you lying down. You were still.
Only your hair waved yet, madly, hunted.
Maybe your death is not the end of everything.
Maybe the sunrise will sow your red seed.
You were so beautiful.
***
You left, flying like the kite of a child.
You left me alone in an empty world,
Often, sadness empties the world.
The body seemed too tight, too fragile,
It breaks to pieces,
It has no room for the infinite.
So, you flew out of the body.
I couldn't fly with you,
The laws of nature are a harsh mother.
So, I wandered in the roads of the rain,
In the roads of hundred suns.
I am thirsty. I am drenched.
I learned how to find you in the rain, in the hundred suns.
***
The shadows come. They conquer the wall.
Each one is alone in himself.
He doesn't know how close is life, how close is death.
He doesn't know that there is something between them: the prison.
He doesn't know that it will be the only world available. The only eternity.
***
The Holocaust in the naked rooms. Even the shadows are naked.
How could you resist sinking beneath the impossible,
How to let raw death be raw in a living body.
In the yard: open veins. A fountain sprinkling the smell of dead blood.
The entrails of people. Heaps of feces.
Price lists of life: life was worth nothing.
Come with me to the naked rooms,
You, who were the child of sadness,
The child of an ancient wound.
You'll see Baal: the eternal god of the cruel.
He didn't kill for hunger. He was hungry for death.
Under the heap of the bodies,
Try, if you can, to lift the tiny shoe of a child.
It is heavy.
You'll see the wall where they tortured the souls, the body was not enough.
It is the true wall of wailing.
It is silent.
Bones don't cry.
***
She has winter lips,
Her gaze; a frozen water fall. Too harsh for beauty.
You'll follow her, begging,
Up to the door of prison.
The door of prison opens only twice;
To enter. To death.
You'll die one spring, at dawn,
The world will be beautiful,
And the car of the grave diggers: tired.
They'll put two sticks: a cross.
It will write the most lonely name:
Unknown.
***
IPHGENIA IN LEONIDOS
Troy was looted.
Time flew like blood from the slit neck of a child,
For a woman of love.
The blood flooded the streets, like a cruel rain,
For a woman of love.
Iphigenia,
Also Jericho was looted, the walls fell like a cureless disease,
Because of a woman of love.
It is doomed until the oceans end.
She left nothing to love.
***
People drown in the strangest places:
In a windless sea.
On earth.
In a cry.
In a silence.
Someone will drown before this evening.
Someone will understand how people drown.
Maybe a moment before we die, or even a moment after,
We understand what killed us for so long.
***
The star dust continues to fall,
On our skin, in our wounds.
It doesn't make us gods,
But it binds us closer to the universe.
Someone will die tonight
With star dust in his eyes,
Like a child, like a vagabond, like the blind.
***
The iron centipedes come.
Their thousand feet. They shoot.
I saw empty bodies, I saw the sunset inside them.
I saw them leave.
They took the cries with them. They hanged them on the street lights.
They took my body, they left it in a cell.
The lamp was snowing. It was cold. As cold as death.
I died then, and I continued to die for years, maybe ages.
***
They pulled our bodies to the police. creatures
They were strange creatures,
Maybe they stole the soul of a machine.
They sat behind their desk,
The desk was an armor.
Nothing could pass through it.
Words are not bullets,
So, they were useless.
***
In court.
They throw charges at me. I don't hear them.
I tossed the words, raw, beastly, to where they belonged.
There are beasts everywhere.
At that time, I loved listening to air planes,
Maybe they knew if god exists.
All I heard was that I was guilty of something,
I don't know of what,
But, I learned how to live with a guilt I don't know.
There are many like me.
***
Poets are mysterious.
They describe
The vulnerability of a shoot,
The unclear symbols of the clouds on the back of the sea.
Maybe, they are great.
Maybe they describe life, the whole life,
In two phrases.
***
I left behind the pictures of dead nature.
I want to see the living nature,
The tree, even when it is naked,
The wide back of the fog,
The twilight, when it rains,
The raindrops: a glow among the shadows.
And I want to see the human nature:
Taverns, schools, houses, cafes:
The city, the great mother of humans.
***
I saw people who sell the sweat of others.
I saw people who run the marathon of hundred hours a day, in order to live.
I saw people whose back hurts. They bow in order to survive.
I saw power: heavy as a typhoon of led.
I saw the ten fingers of hunger in mouths.
I saw the crucified, the cross in their body,
The offered their sacrifice to the hang man.
In cheap hotels, I saw women sowed with mud.
I saw women who gave the hunger in their breasts to a child.
I saw warriors among flocks of nightingales, massacered.
I saw the inexplicable, the new king,
In a shell of a sun ray.
It was dusty. It was naked.
***
We are new. There was nothing like us before.
We are the most perfect shape of thought.
We are resistant to the temperatures of glaciers:
The new hells are frozen.
We give names, so that things will exists.
And we became a mine field:
A place to kill, impersonal, blind.
We didn't give it a name.
***
The mother land,
A poet of suns, an olive grove,
Ancient gods in her veins.
This mother land
Is a ghetto, it is painted with borders,
It was bought by those who buy sweat, crimes.
This mother land,
Showed me, in wars, holy, unholy,
With a hand bones and shadows, proud, defeated,
The exit to zero.
***
The bar.
The air full of sperm from the eyes of the men, from their shouts, from their sweat.
The woman was beautiful.
Her winter lips. A frozen water fall breaks when she smiles. Her smile bleeds.
No one knows her.
No one thinks that women sell their life to a child, to a man who left.
They have nothing left to sell, except their thighs of love,
To drink the sperm like a cry, like a howl. To drink and to be silent.
***
She was mad. Her madness was silent.
Only the cats knew her. Cats are not afraid of madness.
Her eyes gathered the void. Her lips gathered a tired sunset.
Her teeth were broken from the hard pain that chewed itself in her mouth.
They said she was tortured, that they tortured her soul, because the body was not enough.
They closed her in a mad house. She escaped.
Maybe she wanted to die by the cats. Cats are not afraid of the dead.
Katerina, my frightened one, my winter sun,
You came from a frozen hell. You needed a blanket of mercy: the madness.
One day it caught fire, you died.
You climbed on the smoke to a somewhere only you knew, you and the cats.
The smoke was peaceful.
***
Midnight. The last station.
God left to meditate in the infinite.
All that remains is nature and the laws of nature.
Time flows in everything: the cycles of the sun,
The nights screaming, they bear the day.
The birds of prey: a child of nature. They kill their hunger.
All that's left is the laws of man:
The blood of the tribes flowing like the slit neck of a child, like war.
Each moment is the beginning of something.
Each moment may be the first step in the journey to human,
To the laws of human.
Beyond the laws of nature
There are only the laws of nature.
They never left us.
***
There is too little freedom.
There are people who know little, they are too tired to think.
They carry too many dead ends: the hunger, the despair, the fear.
No one can be free with those dead ends.
Necessity is a mother.
When there are dead ends, it comes before freedom.
The dead ends have to die. They are deadly.
And then, we can talk about freedom.
***
It is a harsh century.
There are people with masks and without.
They are always hungry, like the gods.
They betrayed themselves, so it is a child's game to betray the others.
All that's left is their demon: death. They fear death.
They sacrifice people to the god of death.
They don't know that these gods are great cynics,
They sacrifice the sacrifice-r.
After all, death is the biggest satire.
***
THE MIDDLE CLASS
A world busy in keeping the world as it is.
Change is a danger.
But keeping the world as it is , is hard work:
Working 24-7. Barbiturates. Loneliness.
Fear behind dark glasses. Dead eyes behind dark glasses.
A shallow grave.
***
There are new prophets:
The army, the stock exchange.
They say there will be a blood shed.
They say wars are necessary. They read Malthus.
And they read the Bible.
They say that God wants to keep the world the way it is.
***
THE DEATH OF A SMALL MERCHANT
Plaka.
The tourist shops in a row.
The blouses stamped with flags. Plastic helmets. Fake gods.
Souvenirs that remember nothing.
The late closing hours, the late dinners, tired, for years, maybe ages.
And in one moment the years crash: the closing hours, the late dinners: dead.
The stock market crashed. An explosion without fire, lethal. It kills.
All around: blouses without bodies, helmets without heads.
All around: the wide back of a cloud, heavy, grey. A tombstone.
***
The fake ancient statues
Everywhere.
All the memories of beauty
Sealed in plastic.
Nothing left to sooth the ugliness,
The autumns raining grey.
***
When we wear the uniform of work
We are someone else,
And when we return home,
We have to peel off the uniform from our body,
To peel the uniform from our skin,
Slowly, silently,
To become different.
Another us.
***
LIFE STYLE
The lush restaurant,
The candle light: funerary.
The glasses shine with wine,
And the clothes shine,
They hide the people inside them,
Expensive shrouds.
The women: slim, silent, lifeless,
A cemetery of love.
Shallow tombs.
***
THE FILM STAR
She comes.
Her dress shines in all the hues of money.
She has all the advantages of love.
Gazes follow her, applauds follow her.
All around her: whatever, whoever owns her:
The gazes, the applauses,
The dresses, the silent men who pay them,
The terrible fear of time.
***
The city: the great tamer.
The cages of a house, the cages of a debt,
The cage of a dream to be rich.
For the men: the indispensable cages of a car. A sexy cage.
For the women: the cage of a wedding ring.
Heavy iron painted in gold.
***
We don't have the wisdom of daily life.
We don't see the infinite in each motion,
The time flowing in each motion,
So, there is no new tomorrow.
It is a consumed, tired yesterday,
Nothing more.
***
In order to find ourselves,
We have to lose ourselves. The exit to zero.
We have to lose ourselves, continuously, endlessly,
In order to find it, continuously, endlessly.
We have to trust life.
***
I have all the powers inside me.
I resist the hostile winds of the ages.
The smell of blind sperm in the winds.
I resist the male-chauvinist gods.
I am a composer of big forests.
I am a woman.
I'd kill to protect the forest.
***
Everything begins in your eyes:
Your words, your silence. The evening light and heavy as a shadow, as love.
Everything begins in your hands.
Your fingers: shells of sun rays, seep in my body
All my songs begin in you. You are in all my songs.
***
You write poetry,
You don't write the blood.
Your poems will breathe alone on the white paper.
It wouldn't become a song of the people. They bleed.
When people sing a song,
It becomes more, much more than a song.
***
In the veins: the human blood.
It flows, it breaks all the clots, all the barriers.
The bones: branches. The Tree of Life. It is eternal.
The breasts: to suckle the ages.
The sperm runs in the streets of the womb.
It struggle to become body.
Everywhere, the smell of dream.
The dream is human.
***
Earth may be a mother,
But she doesn't love all her children.
And she is furious.
She feels in each furrow that stubs her,
In each seed that steals her body,
That she became a slave.
That the lords of the world own her.
They don't know that the earth is the beginning of everything,
Of forests and fires of peaks and abysses.
The beginning of earthquakes,
They slice the world like the neck of a child. It bleeds.
The earth is free.
***
Prometheus nailed to the rock.
The sun hangs on the rock, like a frozen water fall, like cold glass.
Pieces of sun fall, it bleeds.
The ravines in his face: full of glaciers,
But the pain is warm, as warm as blood.
The more he hurts, the more he fears,
The hand that touches his wound is almost human.
He doesn't know that the one who loses is guilty. He is guilty.
He looks down, beneath the infinite: an abyss,
Inside it, an immense mirror:
Another Olympus. The Olympus of men-gods, the lords of earth.
He is nailed for centuries, he is too tired to think, to remember,
The regular path of thoughts is pain.
He didn't know that the lords of earth created him, and endless other gods,
From the mud in their body, from the mud in their soul,
The mud full of carnivorous insects.
He didn't know that they need him, in order to keep the world as it is,
In order to nail time, like him, to the rock. A nailed eternity,
To let nothing new in depth or in height.
He saw how his voice was an echo, coming from the abyss,
That his hunger was an echo too, the lords of earth were always hungry.
He knows he wanted to save no one from sin. Sin is freedom.
He saw that in order to sin, you need power, like the gods.
He saw that the strong ones never donated their strength,
They have the holy duty to make it always more, like the gods.
He believed he was a child of earth, that inside him forests began and fires,
That he kidnapped love from the bodies.
He saw the earth: he was never there. He was a dream of the lords,
An echo of their wild fires, of their kidnapped loves.
He saw how the lords push away each other, the violent blood, like the gods.
He saw how the poor have to work, because the strong want to eat,
And to feel the air full of pleasures.
He saw that the poor have to work, in order to grow too tired to think.
He saw the law: there are those who work, and those who are rich.
The gods had slaves too, for all the eternities.
He saw the demon of the lords: death. Their fear.
He saw how they built the Olympus above in order to be eternal.
It was strange, because they didn't know how to be happy,
Maybe one eternity wouldn't be enough.
Poor Prometheus,
It is a world of mirrors.
You were not prepared for another Olympus.
You were not prepared to see your face, naked as a bone.
You were not prepared to know you are a dream,
But your pain was real. Dreams know how to bleed.
***
THE DANCE OF THE SEA NYMPH
Dawn. The birds become sun, trees, sea.
The two seas reflect each other, the two seas melt into foam.
I touch the sun in the water, my body tied to the foam,
My body melts with the foam.
I feel your ancient wound,
The branches of your rage: lightening. Naked bones.
I feel the glaciers in your breath.
I feel the suns that choke the flowers, the faraway suns, in your breath.
Your breath is infinite.
I feel how you open your body, you let the light melt in your entrails.
Your body is infinite.
The earth is foreign. You are a mother. You bear me:
A shell with a sun ray in my fingers.
You bear my dance, heavy and light as love,
Each day more.
***
THE DANCE OF THE ANGELS
Pieces of sky fall.
It rains shadows. It rains angels.
The angels roll down,
Rolls of ancient silk,
Soft and heavy as love.
They are bodiless.
All their body is in their eyes,
All their body is in their soul.
They see the innocent cycle of life, kidnapped like a child.
The forests of fire, the killing and the killed. The violent blood.
They see nature, they see the human nature:
Crucified.
They can see nothing more, as if someone crucified their eyes.
And the crosses continue.
***
THE MOTHER OF CHRIST
The sun steps lightly on the road.
Your good shadow fills the home.
You were quiet, smooth. An olive grove raining oil.
But somewhere far I hear the growling.
Fear and hate are mothers.
They bear the white nights, the black days.
They bear the growling.
I close all my souls in order not to feel,
But the pain feels me.
You die in spring, my son, when life is so beautiful.
They crucify you. They crucify your thirty years,
And they crucify my fifty years. They bleed
They crucify you,
And your only guilt was your innocence.
***
MAGDALENE
My scents had the teeth of secret nights. They bit.
My voice, opaque, smooth, it rolled in the deepest shadows.
My body was a silent fire,
There was nothing as silent as my silence, nothing more scalding.
Everything happened slowly, like eternity.
Beneath the woman of love, there was something innocent,
Maybe it was the childhood. The soul of a child may be stubborn.
I met you. I met the terrible pleasure of longing, the terrible pain.
I followed your footprints, your footprints were sand,
But there were tears in your feet. They glowed.
Whatever was to be said, was said already.
You couldn't add something new.
But you knew how to listen, you listened even to the silence.
When you listen to the silence, the silence speaks.
You were crucified as a false god,
But I, the sinner, the innocent,
My life: the exit to zero, my life: the exit to a child,
Only I knew how much you were man. A true man.
***
ARISTAE
By the grave of Jesus.
The grave is small, like all graves.
The grave closes inside it, like all graves, all that was, all that wasn't.
Everything is earth. Everything is a seed of something.
By the grave, everything is naked, even the smoke.
Behind the smoke, naked as the smoke, Aristae, the goddess.
Aristae
Inside me, the whole creation dances. After all I am a woman,
Creation was a body of love, from the start.
My eyelashes, heavy as a summer evening. They promise everything and nothing.
I remember the first thighs of love in my thighs.
The exquisite abyss.
My hair: a raven's wing. Rage plucks my feathers one by one. It hurts.
In my body: all the migrating animals pass.
The gazelles, the panthers with skulls in their mouth ,violent bones.
Aristae is a symbol, a goddess, and like all gods, she has inside her,
More, much more than one god.
On the stage: the first god.
I am the god of the strong of the world.
Gods of the merchants of sweat, of slaughter in war and without,
Merchants of hunger.
They own me, after all, they created me from the mud in their body, the mud in their soul.
On the stage: the second god
I am the god of heaven.
For sure, the strong ones inherit the earth,
And who will inherit heaven is a dusty sun ray in a shell. A dusty question.
After all, the strong ones created heaven, in order to kill their demon: death.
They write the songs of the angels.
On the stage: the third god.
I am the god of arts, of the art of arts:
I freeze the river time on a canvass. I catch the fish of time.
And I paint the frozen river in the eyes of people.
A frozen time. A frozen eternity.
Nothing new in the depth and in the height.
I am a thief of souls. Artists steal souls.
I steal them from everywhere: open graves, the bleeding dust of war.
The mud in their eyes makes them more surreal, more artistic.
And I paint all the gods in one picture:
Three faces in one face.
***
THE SONG OF THE DREAMER
Necessity is a mother.
I bore my dream, and it bore me.
In my voice: the living speak, and the dead, and the belly full of love.
In my voice: all the human storms speak.
The mine field beneath the tiny shoes of a child,
Beneath the hard feet of the hungry. Holocaust in naked rooms, bleeding.
Time flowing like an eternal crime.
In my voice: the past speaks, the whole journey to human.
There will be change.
Change walks in the faded shoes of people,
The shoes that have tilled the earth for too long.
It goes to another place of reality.
The place will be human.
***
THE SONG OF THE PEOPLE
We woke up in bleeding abysses: wars,
In mother lands painted with borders, with fences, with pain.
We are the ones who sold their sweat, their life.
We want our life back.
We are the ones who were killed in the holy- unholy wars.
We died, miracle of miracles: for god, for the sacred lords of the world,
For the church:the miracle giver, for the virtues of the dead.
Each one of us has inside him a grave.
Each one of us has a cemetery of pain.
We want our life back.
The earth, the sea, men: history obeys them. It has no choice.
Beyond the laws of nature, there are only the laws of nature.
Beyond the laws of humans, there are only the laws of humans.
The shapes, the colors, the artists of the world,
Thoughts, imagination, art, dreams,
The great gifts.
We need to be less tired, we need time,
In order to see, to think, to feel.
We paid our debt to life.
The only debt left is the debt to human.
We'll pay it.
***
There is no manual for what crime is,
So, we don't know if hunger is a crime, if war is a crime,'
If selling the sweat of other is a crime.
And there is no manual for forgiving.
The people don't forgive some things easily.
On the other hand,
Sins are simple.
They are written in all the manual of the gods,
And we can be easily be forgiven:
We confess, or we buy forgiveness.
***
PROLOGUE
Your yesterday is your tomorrow, for years, for ages,
The same wine you drink and it drinks you. The wine that forgives nothing..
The same knees that tremble, that mock you,
As if your soul was too little, or your pain too much.
Inside you, your twenty years, a sun ray in a dust shell,
Showing the other that you'll become.
THE PAINS OF MARY
The pain is too tight, and the home is too tight for the pain.
I walk out.
My body, young, almost a child, learns how to ache, how to kneel to pain.
My son,
Pain is the road of the roads, you'll find me there.
The earth, the trees that drink its depth, it drinks my body,
The warm mud in my hair, like a nest, like death.
My eyes melt like foam, like smoke,
Shapes without color, colors without shape.
I want my eyes back. I want to see you.
After the visit of the angel
I saw you. We see sun ray each day, and we don't know what they mean.
Your wings: deep in the river of time.
One wing drenched by the yesterday, one- by the tomorrow.
I don't know why you left me alone with the infinite.
The infinite is heavy. The infinite is death.
My son,
You will be calm, you'll graze the quiet, like a valley.
You wouldn't be made of the hard woods of warriors, of crosses.
I lean over you to smell the warm bird in the breath of a child,
And then, I look in the window. You leave.
My son, remember,
You don't know how people resist sinking below the meridian of zero.
Remember,
The best truth is the truth of the silence. Don't speak.
Somewhere deep I know each time I'll bear you,
You'll bear your cross.
***
JUDAH
Judah leaves his friends,
He stands on a hill. A bony shape.
Bones know how to break, how to hurt.
At times, pain carves the thoughts in our eyes,
We see what we think.
The dust: echoless. The dust like a water fall of desert.
The sky is lit but sunless.
He sees the city.
A city whose alleys pass through him, heavy and light as love.
He mumbles:
We till the desert, barefoot, for years, maybe ages.
We all hallucinate ghosts. There is too much desert inside us.
We all become ghosts, wild ghosts, like pain. There is too much pain inside us.
We don't know the why's: will, faith. The longing for the holy hurts.
We all want a tiny place, here, on this earth. We have the fear of heights.
The sun is warm, the mother of seeds,
But our years grew only dead seeds, we learned the taste of death.
We are the great living-dead of the world.
He says nothing. In His eyes the sky dreams itself.
His words, His silences are soft, yet, they bite .
Tonight, I'll revolt. The revolution of sin.
Tonight, the merchants of god will say:
He sold Him for a pouch of coins.
***
THE PUNISHMENT OF THE LAWLESS
On the hill of Golgotha: the body of Christ.
On the cross, engraved; the king of the Jews.
All around; sun and deep darkness.
Death left the hands open as a cry. The face; naked bones.
His eyes are open, they look.
Down below, armies and people. The dance, they curse.
Their hate is still hungry.
On the grasses, animals deep in the quiet of the valley,
As deep as innocence, as deep as oblivion.
The soul and the body of Christ begin talking. They don't hear each other.
THE SOUL
He was innocent, drunk with a dream. I gave him the wine. The wine was a killer.
I touched his ancient wound, I felt the terrible pleasure of pain.
I try not to look, but souls are eyes.
I see. I keep all the crosses inside me. The nailed blood.
I try not to listen, but souls are the great ears. I hear.
I keep all the growling, the cries, the holocaust of silence inside me.
I carry in me the past, the future, I carry the infinite time,
And I resist sinking below the line of zero. I keep all the abysses : the violent mud.
I can bless no one.
I didn't come here to save the people, to be a seed, to grow.
I am a tyrant savior.
The sky is empty. There is no father there.
And down here; the great orphans of the world.
Remember,
This earth will be slice, like the neck of a child,
And the hungry void will be hungry.
I wouldn't be there.
You'll be alone.
THE BODY
I return to the artisan: the world.
It gave me shape, it gave me colors.
I return into the world, always more, always deeper.
Inside me, there is a crowd of cries, naked as a cry.
There is a crowd of pain, naked as pain.
I was young once.
The path of the gazelles passed through my body.
I should have lived,
Mind and body in earth,
Earth in my mind with my body.
I was too innocent.
I didn't recognize the killer inside a dream.
I didn't realize that the soul, the mother of the dream,
Was not a mother.
***
THE PEOPLE AT GOLGOTHA
The crowds came from everywhere.
The dance, they curse wildly.
Often the people are not more merciful than the shepherds.
They regret you died so quickly. Their hate is still hungry.
You wanted to bring god closer.
You knew so little.
You didn't know that the shepherds, the strong of earth,
Need god high,
So far from the people, so close to their power.
You didn't know that the shepherds lead with a knife in their palm,
They thought you wanted to be god.
You were a pitiful god.
They didn't have enough spit to wash your halo.
They regret that you were not a robber, a killer, a druggy,
Those things would make you respectful,
Those things forgive.
***
SOMEONE WOUNDED HAS THE VISION OF THE SECOND KINGDOM
The sky is the first chaos.
There is not one sky, there are many,
Depth beneath depth.
The colors: the red of the blood, the yellow of a mad eye,
Become thousands.
They become the colors of all colors, the shapes of all shapes.
I never knew how many years were in my years,
I died so many times that I felt almost eternal.
The earth is sliced, like the razor in the hand of a killer,
Her entrails are naked. They burn.
Her entrails full of pain, rage, hate.
I lost my eyes, I lost my ears,
Yet, I see, I hear the silence, a silence deeper than a cut throat.
I hear the pain.
In front of me; an immense crowd. The disinherited of the world.
Their body, their soul devoured by wars, by violent blood, by violent hunger.
The killers keep the last bullet in the gun.
The soldiers carry their legs on the shoulders,
The drowned ones keep the sea in their hands,
The mad ones cry. Madness is deep. It may burn you, naked as bones. It hurts.
And the women of love, almost girls,, cover their thighs with the hand of a rapist ,
They are the greatest disinherited of the world.
We walk towards the Judge, towards the scale of sins.
There is only the Holy ghost.
Christ and Mary, the humans who know what pain is, are not there.
The human pain is not there. It weighs nothing.
God spoke,
His voice seemed close and far , like a promise of eternity.
It became always louder, because it passed from soul to soul.
When He spoke to us, the disinherited, it was cold, it had glaciers in it,
And to the lord of earth, it was as gentle as a lullaby.
We had no choice. We gathered in a corner of the sky.
We realized
That the earth, the sky, were not two worlds.
They were one world, the world of the strong.
There is only one law: the violent blood.
The strong of the world created their eternity, their god,
And they created the disinherited, the victims,
Whatever they suffer, they'll suffer it forever. Suffering is a good teacher.
The strong ones worshipped god, because god worshipped them.
The thirst of the sky is an open vein, the gods are always thirsty.
God speaks
I need the strong ones tall, on the peaks of blood,
And I need the victims beneath the line of zero.
I have no choice.
If there will be human law on earth,
I'll lose my kingdom,
I'll have nowhere to go.
***
I live, like everybody else, tip toeing from truth to truth.
I want to know where god begins and ends,
Where the cycle of nature begins and ends.
Jesus, the fence builder, the fence destroyer,
Tell me, what somewhere deep, I already know.
Tell me that nature has no beginning, no end.
Tell me that eternity begins here, on this earth, in this life,
Like the seed I sowed in my sweat.
***
The sea. The ship.
Each board drinks the salt, like pain,
The pain of knowing, the pain of feeling, the human pain,
Like an eye: the pain of seeing. The human eye.
I would like to be a quiet pebble,
To let the sea move me, softly, forward and back,
And to stay here, in this port, in my city.
But beliefs are a power, beliefs are a call,
And the road is a call,
So I have to go on,
On my shoulders: the wooden legs full of salt.
***
Before I touch your root,
I want to show you something beautiful:
I'll be naked, and you'll be naked, Greece, my love, my pain.
We'll tip toe on the sand, like the light,
We'll walk towards each other, always more.
We'll walk over the shivering water: the sea,
Our wild thighs of love.
Greece, my sad woman,
I need your truth, you need mine,
Even if it would be a faded net, torn by holy, unholy teeth .
We need to save each other.
***
Greece,
So many songs in your song,
They were the songs of people, they were their lament.
You let the strong ones of the world build an Olympus in you. An Olympus of the lords.
You forgot that necessity is a mother, of the people, of the gods,
You forgot that the mother of all Muses, all the thoughts, is the world.
You forgot how to love .You forgot your songs.
So, now, in the Olympus of men, Laughter is crucified.
They call madness -thought, they call thought- madness.
And the body of love is a phallic statue.
The violent sperm.
Their demon is death. They fear. They believe in after life.
And they invent fate, it explains everything:
The hunger of the hungry, the hunger of the gods.
It was a useful invention.
The family of the strong walks regally, in metal shoes.
They crash your mouth, they crash your eyes.
Greece, the sad woman,
You are under siege: your songs, your truth, your past, your tomorrow.
Your clear song, they gave it guns.
Your clear song was shot, they shot even its echoes.
Greece, the wounded woman,
The entrails of your soul, your infinite soul, are torn,
And the strong ones close your wound with the song of the angels.
And they build a wooden statue of freedom, easy to burn.
Greece, betrayed and betrayer,
You don't realize how many souls are in your soul.
Your eyes were crashed, so you didn't see us. You don't see our silence.
Our silence is dead, maybe the dead of the holy wars,
Maybe of the holy hunger, maybe of unholy revolts.
You don't know the holocaust of silence inside you.
***
Poetry is a kind of magic.
It may be the sixth sense, open among the other five.
It is a child of its time, even when it is full of past, of future,
Yet, it can steal time in a word, like a frozen minute,
Like a moment of remembering.
It says things, even when it doesn't say them,
It may be gentle as a lullaby, or be a knife in a cry.
But, it uses words. Words don't have the hundred mouths of a tear,
So, it is not the absolute magician.
And it doesn't belong to the poet,
It belongs to whoever needs magic.
***
We need at least a drop of truth in order to trust.
Rains wait for such a trust
We spent much youth to arrive here.
The roads were not merciful. They tore our toes, our feet are naked as bone.
Now we know that when we decide, somewhere, sometime, to walk,
We have already arrived.
In each step we felt the past, the tomorrow inside us,
The river of time, young and old, alive as blood.
We are a new sperm, there is no one to save us,
Except the human within us, the human within the people.
We paid our debt to life:
We touch in our touch the pain, the struggle, the joy.
All that's left is paying the debt to humans.
We'll pay it.
***
My companion: my shadow.
Loneliness is cruel. You feel you travel from the alone to the alone.
The dream became always more inside me, inside my entrails.
I stumbled again and again over myself.
Wherever I went, time was in front of me, I was in front of myself.
I used my feet to walk the earth,
And the earth used my feet to walk.
Inside me, there were all the men that exist, even though I was alone.
If I'll arrive, you all will arrive with me,
Even though there is no real arrival,
The journey to human is endless,
And death is a journey too, into the world, always deeper..
***
ADAM AND EVE IN THE FIRST PARRADISE
We loved, not as a serpent, as poison.
We loved deep in our bodies of love.
The body of love when it loves, is holy.
We loved, his night in my night, there were stars in our tongue.
We loved by the Tree of Life, and the Tree loved us.
We were condemned. The body of love was unholy.
We'll live in the only hell that exists: here, in this life, on this earth.
***
The passion
Began in the earth where I came from, in the earth where I'll go.
Your hand rose to my face and fell down.
Your hand chocked you, like a bone. A chocked caress.
I was alone. My passion was heavy, it hurt.
I don't know who won, who lost.
Your passion was a lie,
Your breasts of winter, the milk: a water fall of ice.
You knew it. You knew the truth.
There was too much winter in you, too much to know how to love, how to be loved.
Some truths cry invisible,
They freeze your soul. They hurt.
***
Virginity never came out of fashion,
And women, embroidered by delicate moon light,
Are as distant, as frozen as moon-water.
You look at them, you wait for a word,
Your soul hangs on their lips,
But they are silent.
After all, the hymen is their secret treasure,
It will buy them a beautiful wedding,
And of course, Paradise.
***
We have a debt to life,
And we have a debt to humans.
In an hour without similar,
We feel our debt,
And we feel it without beginning, without end.
On the other side of the room, on the other side of life:
The shadows are faces, the shadows are laughter,
The shadows are a wild animal.
The shadows are a hand with a knife in its palm.
A girl begins a twirling, dancing.
She is, like everybody else- a world.
She has inside her, like everybody else- a world.
Her body: a silent light. A moon.
In her delicate lips: terrible depths rise.
Her sadness, the mad depth are mothers,
They bear her terrible passion to learn
The taste of blood, the taste of death.
The world inside her bleeds.
The last passion.
***
Women,
They are the splashing in my ears, like a distant sea.
Their body: a garden of the lords. A castle.
The years stole my soul, they stole my eyes,
I don't have enough soul, enough eyes to see you close.
You are a hallucination, a horizon.
You were mothers,
You bore your dream: a leaf of sunset.
Maybe I long for other women, for other mothers:
The mothers of Mesolongi, Zalongo,
The terrible power, the terrible love
To put on a child the tiny last shoe, the immense shoe.
They are nameless, like me.
They are bodiless, like me.
Their hands, immense, human,
Remained open like a cry.
Somewhere deep they mingle in each other.
And all that's left is a tremble in our eyes.
***
You know the loneliness of a poet.
You know the that years you lost, and that lost you.
But the lost years may be mothers,
They maybear the years in which you live,
In which you know who you are.
And these years were scavengers:
No one can imagine the souls that people throw in the trash.
If you can, embrace all the Muses in a verse,
If you can, embrace all the people in a verse, a Haiku of souls.
***
Songs,
You come from everywhere,
From the Moria, from the islands, from the rocks of Tempi.
There is too much pain, too little joy,
And yet, you are all I have.
I don't want to have spectators inside me,
I want you to go on the stage,
To sing the love, the pain, life, the sadness, the joy.
My song came from very far,
To sing to you, heavy and light as love,
To draw you in a word: human.
I am happy.
***
Stay far.
I don't want the shadow of my loneliness to cover you.
Suns, moons, tremble in this shadow.
But, it you are alone too,
If the shadow is a violent blanket,
I'll come towards you, always more,
We'll love, if we can, your shadow in my shadow,
We'll love if the closeness wouldn't be a threat,
We'll love, if we are not too lonely to love.
***
The sky doesn't flow into the ravines,
Yet, it rains outside and inside me.
You don't see me,
I am of the great invisibles of the world.
Maybe I am a root. One day I'll be an olive grove.
You'll see me.
You'll love my shade, you'll love the leaves full of sun.
You'll lean on me, and you'll feel the deep passion.
Roots are the deepest passion.
***
I remember
The tremble of your lips, drowning in your breath.
Your soul open and close, like a hand before the fist.
Our bodies: a piece cut from the twilight.
You raise your hand to me, and it falls down.
We were too afraid, too alone to love.
Loneliness is a harsh mother.
***
I have so many years to give you,
And I have my hand ,crashed by life.
Give me your hand, keep my hand, naked as bone, innocent as bone.
In your hand. Hands know how to love.
We'll be each other's song, an old song, forgotten,
But it doesn't matter, the songs will remember us, they'll sing us,
They 'll sing even when there would be no one left to hear.
The memory of songs goes far, much further than what we imagine.
***
I wasn't as tall as your gaze.
Ii wasn't as tall as the sky in your breath,
So, I drowned, again and again,
In the waves of your breasts,
I drowned in the mad song of your body,
And I don't know how tall is love.
***
Look at the bewitched mirror,
Where pieces of sun fall: shapes, colors.
Lean your eye on the sun,
And you'll see the triple image:
The one you are, the one you are not, the one you wanted to be.
Maybe you'll find who is the one who is alone,
Who is the one who is not afraid to cry.
***
Greece, my woman.
Lets' tear the living shrouds,
Our face, our bodies, naked beneath our skin.
My hand in your hands sweats.
You don't like the sweat, you let your hand fall.
Greece, my woman,
You forgot how to love.
You forgot the sweat that sing you
In the fields, in wars, in the dying sigh.
***
The moon-wine grows. The shadows: inebriated.
It is one of those evenings, to live, to die, wholly.
Your body in my body,
The summer in your lips,
Your arms: a water fall of suns.
Inside you, I lived, I died so many times.
I feel almost eternal.
Maybe, this is the eternity of love the poets love to sing.
***
Time is a border, an infinite border.
Time is a road, an infinite road.
And we have no choice.
We go on, one shoe on the road,
One shoe at the border.
Like a human who touches each moment, the borders of a moment,
Like a poet who touches the borders of the night.
Like a dreamer who touches all the borders of time that exist.
***
I want to feel the star dust inside me,
To be as endless, as simple, as generous.
To feel my substance in the substance of whatever exists.
To feel in my breath the breath of the most distant star.
To speak to the things of the world in the mother tongue of the world.
To know I exist, and the ocean of things around me exists,
As real as water and salt.
To know that everything is a seed of a million rivers,
A waterfall of worlds.
***
In the circus
The horses leap on all four hoofs, like an ancient dream of flight.
The acrobats walk on the tight rope,
With blind feet, they don't know where they go, why they go.
The rubber woman travels, body and soul, into a suitcase,
In a journey that goes nowhere.
And the clown makes everything understood.
***
The blind violinist never got used to the dark.
He plays, with the ten nights in his fingers,
The music of light. He makes light sing.
We should never get used to the dark.
***
On the cross roads of the night
All my blamed come.
Their eyes: a frightened sparrow.
Their eyes: a human who lives in order to die.
They say: we died so many times that we feel almost eternal.
They say: one death more or less changes nothing.
They say: tonight someone will die.
And it is sad.
We shouldn't die so easily.
We should love life enough to live for it.
We should know that each death is one death more, one life less.
We should know life is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have.
We cannot afford losing unused life.
We cannot leave it to the scavengers.
For them, nothing is holy.
***
We live always at the cross road:
The biggest Russian roulette in the world.
It needs power to know you may be shot,
And yet, to choose.
It needs power to love life so much,
Enough to step in the cross road,
Enough to be shot, and yet, to choose.
***
We teach the children the sin and the punishment,
So, we teach the how to fear.
But fear is a harsh teacher,
It is a prison,
And the thoughts of the punishment are a prison too.
These children will grow one day, with bars in their eyes.
Maybe love could be a key.
But fear is afraid also of love.
***
The road tears our feet, and our feet tear the road.
There are too many sighs in our life.
We gave our whole life to pay our debt to life,
Even our shadows are empty.
And we bend over the last rivulet,
We drink the time in the water,
We drink the end of eternity.
***
THE ATTACK
The soul runs in front of the body,
Cruelty kills me a thousand times.
The river of time became a moment: a violent water fall.
The time inside me is thirsty.
The wind melts the day.
I look, my eyes nailed to something. They bleed. They fear.
And the soul is again in front of my eyes. It trembles. It leaves.
I look for a gaze that sees me, but no one knows each other.
How many people are alone.
My eyes: deep holes.
They don't bleed. They don't fear. And they hope for nothing.
There are too many people. There is too little world.
***
Someone, someone mad, jumps in front of the crowd:
If I could I would give you thousand hands, thousand guns,
So the massacre will continue.
I have a hole in my shoe, I tilled the road for too long,
But I have a useful memory.
They gave you the immense eyes of a hunter,
The hands, a fist of bones,
And the mud deep in your life. It cannot be washed.
I saw truth, beauty, walk on the other side of the fence.
There are too many dreams, and too few men.
Maybe, one day, the world will change its axis.
There will be many people,
And only one dream, one immense dream: The Human.
***
