Greece

Dead Boy Denouncing

Niki reads in English and in the original Greek:
[flashvideo filename="/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/deadboydenouncing.mp3" /] [flashvideo filename="/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/deadboydenouncing-greek.mp3" /]

In Memory of Alexis

You are the new people.
You are the empty palm
being torn up
in a dwindling division.

You are a thousand half-moons
not tending to full-moons.
You are the ones
who will make me immortal.

But I like you less-
it hurts and hurls a drilling pain
when you ask me to symbolize
the sick sun that burned the city down
while I am frozen.

When loots of grief
become the lightning of fury,
someone smashes
his synthetic life
upon shop windows.

When bits of death-confusion
form masses of cold tears,
not rolling through my soul’s ditch
not mending the moment
not shouting out loud

like I shouted then-
a fifteen year-old scream
inside your chest.

Until I silence Destiny’s
black mouth,
which spits requiems
straight on my grave,
and sanctify with laurels
the shadow of the idealist,
mine is the trunk,
mine is the resin.
The blood of nature
is my blood.

The caterpillar-
the colours will make it bloom into
a butterfly,
and then the wings will flap inside
a dusted palm, decolourized.

The crazy man,
for whom the mountains wail,
sits upon the truth
while all the others tread.

I have no road to take
behind, ahead or next to
me. I have myself and
nothing more to reach for.

The brakes of dreams
shrill, echo to infinity.
Cloud dust of children
ruining in the yard-
what they have been taught
is called catastrophe.

I will never make love to you,
but I’ll give you the biggest heart
and a riotous rock to lift,
and face your future.

 

© Niki Andrikopoulou 2009