After the Effort
The horrified face was almost covered. Dishevelled hair, ripped
shirt, bruised flesh. They gave him back the leather belt,
the wristwatch, and the black comb left on the long table. He
took them. He didn’t know what to put on first, his watch,
his belt? Where would he place his comb? He looked at
his ID papers, “Lucas” it said. “Lucas,” he said to himself.
he didn’t raise his eyes; he put on the watch with slow haste
(The table was the reason, such empty, and dark as it was
and with a scratched corner), he put his belt on and tied it.
He was still tightening it when he walked to the hallway; the
old bathrooms stunk, the pipes dripped, the boy at the cafe
was collecting the bottles and the guards were talking
through the skylight. “Lucas, Lucas” he repeated as if
talking to a foreigner, in a foreign language. The evening
had arrived. The streetlights and the lights of the Museum
were just turned on.
Long Listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards
https://griffinpoetryprize.com/press/2023-longlist-announcement/
Last Command
Each night, a lament was coming from the empty
glasses of the alcoholics, dirty desires, harassed me
in the laundry room however, a shadow of a spider
was enough to open heavenly melodies on the wall;
I stood by the stairs, I ran to order their coffees,
for this, they never looked at the sky to see me
sitting to His right; only the old woman put incense
in the censer and climbing on the smoke, she slept
with me.
It was a star-filled night, and children waited
for words from the animals while I, in the middle
of the fields, so sad that a flock of birds could fly
through my body, taking all the coal dust of
the deserted stations with the forgotten people,
went out to the marketplace and had nothing
else to sell, I sold my confessions for the blessing
of my future days.
When I finally sat to rest, it was very late,
the wind brought bells, the day returned, and
I was expelled, I who one night in the fields
grew breasts to feed an old beggar who was
begging for his mother in his last moments.
That night, I emptied so much that when
they threw the knife at me it didn’t have
any flesh to pierce.
Transcription
I sit by the front step of the forever-absent
decayed transcription of God
I mirror myself
in the retina of the cosmos
the shell of utopia that evolves
unregretful touch inside a conch
when each person is alone
irrelevant of who might have passed inside of him
he doesn’t know which land he’s lost.
The starting signal was given in his absence
at the delta where the sky gave birth
to labyrinths, to enigmas, to young Odysseus
routes of the invisible Eros
in the preannounced scar of the world
Ancientry
I the first man
laid the woman
onto this grass
image lustful and
tender that conquered
my soul
ebb of land vision of trees
with their soft whispers
smoothening my inexperience
when initially
I smelled her horny mound and
fell into its cave
like a cape into the sea
life is ours
my beloved
I said and
time has come to adhere
to the Great command
procreate and fill the earth
with your sweat
as it was wished by our forefathers
as it was written on our tablets
Immortality
And I swore before the blurry eyes
of my kin to cleanse their lot with
the heartache I inherited, I promised
to search in their dirt for my immortality
I was to paint the bulbs of the earth black
and again, to insert them into the soil
so they would sprout up like new
penises to enter hungry mounds
and to feel the ecstatic mixture of pain
and joyful cocktail of drugs
that put my consciousness to rest
to these, I swore standing opposite
my kin’s secret grandeur
when they begged for more,
such flimsy was their self-esteem
and in their ridicule, in their viscera
I came to know
the lone glimpse of optimism
leading them to their self-destruction
Manolis Aligizakis 