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 