While Homer Slept

CHORUS OF PHILOSPHERS’ WIVES

We were ladies,
we married our husbands.
We put up with their nonsense,
on a daily basis.
If you take the whole of female suffering
with men and expressed it in fabric,
you could use it to bandage the earth’s bleeding.

What was wrong with our men?
They wanted it all.
They wanted a beautiful house,
strong sons,
and they wanted to be androgynous
men, in ornately designed
amphitheatres
in and out of the mind,
impersonating goddesses of the iron age.
We could have murdered our husbands,
so easily. They mostly fell to bed drunk,
completely helpless and susceptible.
We could have murdered our husbands
so easily, but of course we couldn’t do that
to our strong sons; it was not in our place,
to teach them, the hard way.

We gaze out of our windows sometimes.
Sometimes our gaze wanders into the timeless Aegean.
Sometimes we can sense pity for us,
but are proud ladies,
resilient.

Our husbands all call simultaneously for their dinner,
WIFE!
We sigh.
Collect our sighs and release them into the skies,
like doves.

 

What happens when I encounter Sleeping Beauty on a very rainy Wednesday afternoon

Sleeping Beauty,
sleep,
for another one hundred years,
because if you wake up you’ll be in tears…

as the prince is actually a dominating bear with too much body hair,
with leather, dildos, and connected hoops hanging in his closet,
and a whip for what he calls ‘your booty’,
so stay asleep Sleeping Beauty

because soon your face will be on Tinder,
and it will then be late to hinder
the cataclysmic cynicism, the utter loss of hope,
all, burnt to a cinder,
because the prince is actually a pig in a Gucci suit.

Ignore the desire to leap,
stay asleep.
Your duty is now to snooze,
to stay on cloud nine,
floating among the stars in a catsuit,
dreaming of a man actually worth your time.

Sleeping Beauty
You are so beautiful,
and your hair.
Would you mind,
terribly,

if I brushed your hair?

 

How I really feel about nostalgia (raindrops on roses)

I’m where you left me / by the window /
outside it is raining / has been /
for over five hours /

The flowers you gave me /
are all potpourri inside books / on the shelf /
I sit / to read / and the stories / smell of [your] / roses

It has been such a long time / nostalgia is bullshit /
I can often feel you in the room / like the scent of burning thorns /
the exhilarated scents / roses make / as they climb higher / skyward.

Hatless

I love you.
I love you more.

You are pure, like morning,
in which we didn’t go to bed, angry.

Like a morning, you keep dawning
on me, occurring to me, profoundly

shaking my leaves, through the twigs,
down to the roots. I bleed some sap

for you, but it`s a small price to pay
for the longitudes and latitudes of your love.

Purify me.
Purify each colour I see.

Make me feel eternal innocence, always
deep inside of me,

so deep,
it is like a diamond hidden in a rock

on the back of Atlas.
Make the winds lift, the gales go,

so I can be, in every way,
hatless.

Travelling Mountain

Open your eyes.
Make a deal.
You’ve been given.

Run down the street.
Where it is always raining.
You’ve been forgiven.

Have no hate in your heart,
hate is lethal,
by extension also to what

might be coming to you.
See, and feel the feeling in seeing.
Seeing is a feeling,

and you and I are human.
Make a deal.
Some sacrifice might be necessary.

To receive, you have to give up.
To absolve the world, the world to absolve you.
And therefore your relationship

not to mention your shifting proximity
to the gods stars heavens
constellations parallel universes alien nations.

Abandon your hate, darling.
Isn’t you anger hunger?
Time to climb the mountain now.

This mountain that travelled so far.
To reach you.

St. Sensation

It goes beyond
aesthetic inquiry to see artistic
mediums affecting each
other; it becomes a view
of sensation.

The Most Pressing Why

Another day of creation.
Or is it the same day?
What begins? A search
typically begins. How?
Curiosity I believe. The need
to answer the most pressing Why?

Answer it, or make out
with it? The human
approach. Our bodies
are torches casting light
upon these cave walls.
It is your turn to hand-paint all

the stalagmites and stalactites.
Keep you company.
Kept in good company.
You are the good girls, this
leaves good guys. I’m not
worried about you
in the least.

Another creation makes a day.
It is a single day, on a loop.
These here be circles, those be curves.
Is our curiosity a science?
Will our art be a masterpiece
or a beast?

 

Naiveté

Our bodies ground us like an anchor grounds a ship; they do not define us. We escape our bodies all the time, and have out of body experiences, in which we learn something about life either through something we read or something someone said. Words rock our world; if anything defines us, it is them.
We go to words, eagerly, with a willingness that could be mistaken for innocence, however not naiveté.
They even convince us that we can be heroic.

Anti-Clockwise Acropolis

This place,
it’s so familiar,
but I have not quite
been here before.

Everything about this place
is wise, minimal, as all in all
is honed perfectly in time and place
like a copper torso in a museum of fine art.

More than often I feel like
my very own body is deceiving me
and my senses are being
controlled by something

external which wishes
to enslave me, but clearly
this is paranoia?
How could anyone be

out to enslave
anyone? When all we
ought to be doing
is following, those birds,

these winds,
those stars. These here marble columns,
this white-washed floor,
those overhanging white clouds

take me back, but I have never
been at the Acropolis before,
and of course I cannot go back
into the life hanging over me

in which I evidently
visited the Acropolis.
When I look down at my body
I can almost see a toga

and sandals
but of course it’s just
blue jeans
and All Stars.

I take photographs,
and post photos of me online
beside antiquities,
and it feels like being haunted,

in reverse. If I could go
back to Ancient Greece,
would it be blissful,
or some sort of purgatory?

Would it be a linear
or a repetitive story?
Would it, truly,
be a reapplication of grace, and glory?

We could be quite clearly
be experiencing actual revelations
and thinking across lives,
but we have not the language for it yet,

if this language exists,
it exists in a state of eternal waiting
like letters typically upright bent,
italics.

My dinner with Kafka

Desire
Franz Kafka was such a striking looking person. And a completely unique author. I cannot wait to work with him.

Agenda
I write a letter to Franz Kafka. I address it to hell, as a joke, although we both know that having done what he has done has shown us hell, as a path to heaven, and not the other way around. Franz Kafka agrees to work with me, but just for an hour. We can write something together, brief, but, he promises, it will be substantial.

Getting what you wish for
What on earth do I serve Franz Kafka?

Twisted menu
I decide to serve Franz Kafka, nothing German, nothing Jewish, no, I decide to serve him treats from my own country, Cyprus. This decision works. Franz Kafka is impressed with my copper jizve, on which I prepare Turkish coffee, he is pleased with the slices of halloumi I serve with toothpicks, with black olives, and slices of heritage tomatoes. He swoons in a reserved way, as I serve him bowls of home made tahini sauce, and taramasalata, and tzatziki, served with hot pitta bread, and he politely yet absolutely devours all the little bowls of butter beans, pork and lamb souvlaki, that I grilled, the salad with feta that I chopped up, not to mention the honey drizzled baklava, which causes him to shake his head in amusement. I smile, so proud of my own heritage, so in love with my own island, it does not matter that I do not live there anymore, it is in me, and I take it everywhere with me, this playfulness, this jostling, this borderline brusqueness, that is so well intended, it could not be anything but brusqueness, what it means, to me, Christos, to be a Greek-Cypriot, to have to explain to people where Cyprus is, on a daily basis, I don’t mind, geography was not one of my strongest points, anyway, my notion of time and space is governed by things that are not always visible. Thank you for coming, Franz Kafka. Thank you for enjoying all of my food. It means the world to me to have watched you eat, and later, when you are gone, I will clean up after you, and I will cry, I am not ashamed to say it, but I will cry, at the impenetrability of the truth that I will never get to see you again.

What actually happened
Franz Kafka and I met at a mid-point between where he is and where I am. This occurs when a reader reads a book by an author, as I was reading The Burrow, a collection of short stories, by Franz Kafka, on the bus home tonight. An unquantifiable, unclassifiable talent, a genius beyond genius, in a room of his own.

Read more
Let’s visit him, and others, more often.