Dark Story
You’re far away and I hear you singing
a stuttering song
of the ones you love
bloody songs with abscesses and tumors.
Birds poke on your face
snakes lurk in your eyes
I’ll come to drink your sickly kisses
convince you with heinous games.
I know of a train destined for nowhere,
a bus that will take you away, I know
the music that blows up mountains,
I know the red fish that will devour you.
Daily Use
Of course all these were somehow vague perhaps even inexplicable
for the ones who raise their glass emphatically over the table without
seeing who holds it until slowly the everyday use makes us mortal;
thus I always tried to look elsewhere when the doorbell rang and when
everything was quietened: where is the host? Why is he hiding?
I leaned on the table that I wouldn’t fall; then bowing my head
I opened the door and followed my path.
And at night, dinner time, in horror, I listened to them narrating
their stories that in a way silenced the dark remote outside — there
where we had lived.
Ink
He added a little ink to the machine,
the words, oh God, how difficult
to form, letter by letter put on
a line, the consonants on their
appropriate places to underscore
where the voice rises and where they
bow their heads, when his eyes don’t
help well, as they did back then when
he started as an apprentice typist, he
hopes to avoid the painful mistakes
of misspelling words which, using a
lens he starts his daily battle against
errors and what’s the value of an accent
in front of a word and that perispomeni*
heroes that fell when the language was
simplified and the old typist turns
from his machine and stooping over
his soup bowl he can only see ink
in his broth, the ink he just added to
the insatiable printing machine
*_______
accent in the shape of a flat line over a vowel
Manolis Aligizakis 