Poetic Movements

I All our traumas sat around the table to dine courteously and with crooked smiles (too civilised for their own good). They exchanged words superfluous and untherapeutic. They drank until it was late and memory appeared to dissolve into nothingness. II Sometimes even after all this time, when the restaurant is empty and the music has stopped, I hear them trying to re-emerge from the surfaces that surpassed them the flowers that outlived them the lights that fooled them – intoxicated and vindicated by no one – into the shadows. I ask myself, sometimes, what will happen if they ever escape the shadows only to find that the dining table has since been replaced and most of their torturous attachments have ceased to be? What hidden and unresolved traumas will we have then? April 2024, Athens. Photograph: March 2024, Loutropyrgos.

  Your wild eyes I picture them devouring the landscape as if the landscape was made to be by your needs consumed. Your wild eyes rest at night whereas mine check the lights, and the clouds, and the stars if they are in place or if by some monstrous doing they have now moved. The view this view the landscape bring peace to my mind my senses except for the eyes that keep looking even when closed and abandoned under the sun. When is quiet and when the winds stop when all the scents in the atmosphere are of the water the water that has poured and the water to come then all that is to see from this room with a view is the lighthouse the firm end of the land the piercing light in the dark longing to be discovered. March 2024, Syros.

I shouldn't have said a word to begin with. Because words hit like waves against coastal cliffs; they make an impression and then retreat to the their chaotic origins – be it sea or sin. 26 Jul. 2020 Photograph: Thessaloniki, Oct. 2023

  Christmas lights shine outside otherworldly and insecure. The island is now farther away amidst the sea withdrawn someone on it standing still. Too early for blossoms and too late for regrets, the winter progresses. Jan/Feb 2024, Athens. Photograph: Gülhane Parkı, Istanbul; Jan. 2024.

In their cracky voices the seagulls talked – they truly did talk – about things that parted continents and seas. The crowd moved in a mass dance a choreography of nothing momentarily interrupted by streetcars. And the waters howled underneath they howled like a heartbeat soon (any moment now) to cease. Souls passed me by; some lost some wandering and some mine. Jan. 2024, Istanbul.