Poetic Movements

  Lambeth / Waterloo Bridge The summer early morning hours smell of fresh cut grass and they come as hesitant as the foxes in the garden; how do I love walking from home to the world’s opening. Tavistock Square An evonym lets itself into the world blossomed and ready – complete and the world takes it instantly; and so I watch the world noticing you and you watch me and there’s some uplift and quietness in this moment that both soothe me. Bloomsbury A radiant cloud settles; all this rain – soft & undecided – transcends London and moves me north while the colours multiply. Trafalgar Square / Westminster Bridge There’s a whole life that with each strike of the clock crosses the bridge and shares herself – so openly; she does so quarter after quarter hoping the right someone will notice. Borough Market / London Bridge I surrender to the controlled chaos and people carry me and at times I carry some stranger, and as I let it all happ...

  The city swirls and swirls undoing itself, in all the ways possible. From this side, the sun warms the skin differently and as I walk deeper in the gardens I am not sure what year I find myself in, or if it matters. I borrow someone else's face as I am allowed and I am confidently another, or maybe many at once, while the square circles me and around me; the only thing that makes sense in the moment. The trees have stored the memory of you, their roots absorbing the pace of your walk, their leaves reflecting your, likewise, many faces. A woman who resembles me stares from the surface of a pond sprouting next to my feet; and she also looks like you, the many versions of you that are all me now. Tavistock square, London, 25 April 2025.

Incapacitated words as spoken hit fully unequipped against the hard surfaces of objects across the room. They roll each surface until they meet the floor, or are forced by their velocity to an abrupt, deep fall. Some – very few – cling on to sharp edge s where accidentally they made contact and attempt to stand breathless and silent expecting this to postpone their demise. But the edges are cutting so the words become torn apart as they hang helplessly above the ground and letter by letter they lose the fabric of their sense. Poor words, the poorest words ever spoken, result demolished on the floor their letters illogically spread across space, their meaning irreparably deranged. Athens, July 2023. Photograph: words colliding against each other; Dundee West End, Scotland, June 2022.  

  We are still driving in the car along this thin line telling day from night apart. You lean and kiss me, and it’s the first time and the hundredth time, and this moment perfectly balancing light with dark hovers on the edges of eternity. It’s the first time and I’m taking you by the hand to walk through Tavistock then Russell then Bloomsbury square minutes before their gates close seconds until I finish these lines. It’s the hundredth time, the hundredth line, the hundredth fragment of a story to be told; and yet words sound like the only (time) at all. Spring Equinox & World Poetry Day 2023. Photograph: Detail from Russell Square, London; 22 Oct. 2022.

  If you closed your eyes for a second maybe you would see a house as it was over a hundred years ago would feel the street uncomfortably cobbled under your feet sense the sun resting wider on surfaces, including your skin hear children's voices through the top window, but not necessarily happy ones. If you closed your eyes and attempted to conceive the very same place decades and centuries ago; would you feel the same? Would you be the same? Imagining Hyde Park Gate in Virginia Woolf’s childhood time; London, 23 Oct. 2022. Picture: 22 Hyde Park Gate, where Virginia Woolf was born & lived until 1904; photo taken on 23 Oct. 2022.

Words my dive on paper and leak the seas continuously, yet they may escape attention and smile indifferently to essence. Words are proof enough there is no essence to things, just a liquid coming and going of impressions and feelings. Words, Virginia Woolf said, “ are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things”. And as such they dissolve little vanities in the air, they consume wishes and stand straight again. Words are, more or less, like dance. They may be documented but are performed only once, because “they like us to think, and they like us to feel” , “ to pause; to become unconscious” , to move in disagreement and collapse gracefully. Words are vacant more often than not awaiting for something and afterwards escaping it. May 2018, Samothraki. Photograph: horizon in Samothraki, 25 May 2018.

In bright mornings my consciousness dives into white patches stardom or a ceiling. All this talk its untidy waves of cloth and satin scattered across the wood. I ask myself what this world will be like in thousand years to come. The smoked stars from underneath; the seven seas resisting land; the little problems that people fear as beasts; belittled causes of some anxiety infinitely escaping desires for cosmopolitanism. In thousand days to find to count one per one to count the stars to be predictable, pedestrian and to be called picturesque by hazy eyes. In theory all starts as settled and ends in compromise. 4 March 2018, fieldwork in Samothraki .

 “ The poet is a dweller in two worlds, one dying, the other struggling to be born.” (Virginia Woolf, The Leaning Tower, 1940, p.173) ___________________________________________ Her eyes fall in eternal gaze. Sundays are wind-alike drying thoughts from the body. The poet stands dazed and amazed. Nothing has changed much but the years. Flowers are offered Mrs. Dalloway, but the dinner is yet to be served. Interventions excuses to write. Black cats scratching their nails against the clock of time. Gardens to awe to dream. Words words; and “parties to cover the silence”*. Silence; wars and expectations foreign lands and desires. Sussex is not subjected to our dreams anymore light and darkness dance on top its fields. The world leans to the future perpetually as dinner is served “ too early for lamps; and too early for stars”**. T he poet stares. January 2018, ...

Πρωινές λίγες λέξεις ενός βιβλίου αφημένου στο πάτωμα τα ρούχα τα χορευτικά μια στοίβα για πλύσιμο. Πρωινές μικρές σκέψεις η παράσταση από χθες το ταξίδι αύριο να προλάβεις το σήμερα. Δεν προλαβαίνω ποτέ τον ήλιο στη σωστή του θέση δεν σε προλαβαίνω ποτέ στο άγουρο του ξυπνήματος και αργότερα τα λόγια μοιάζουν ξένα. Ποιήματα του μεσημεριού να περιγράψω πόσο πολύ σε ξέρω και πόσο αγαπώ το φως. Βιβλίο αφημένο στο πάτωμα από χθες και προχθές όσα δε βγήκαν στην σκηνή και όσα το πρωί δεν σου είπα. Βιρτζίνια Γουλφ ψάχνεις στο πατάρι σημειωματάρια σκονισμένα με ποιήματα. Απογευματινά αισθήματα να συνοδεύουν τον καφέ τη μικρή καταστροφή της έμπνευσης. Ραντεβού δίχως τηλεφώνημα πριν δύσει ο ήλιος κι ακουστεί το πρώτο κουδούνι. Με τα πόδια ως το κέντρο στα παρασκήνια η ίδια βαβούρα της αναμονής. Πριν την παράσταση ένα βλέμμα πίσω απ’ την κουρτίνα εσύ στην πλατεία διαβάζοντας.   Πλυμένα ρούχα ...

I was strolling down the main road to the port, just right after the sunset. Last night as it was, my eyes were savouring the landscape until the next time, the next journey to the island. About an hour or less after that, miles away, in our house in Athens, my grandmother would be unexpectedly leaving me. Two hours later, I would have known, unable to react, unable to make a difference, unable to ask her why.   I spent the night doing the same things once and twice and many times; but time was not bothering to spare me. I arrived at the ship very early, and then again I had nothing to do but wait, gazing at the people entering, most of them already familiar one with the other, chatting their news.      For November it was a sweet weather. I walked up to the deck and as we were distancing on board from the island, the wind got stronger and violent. Violent was also the sun, rising above the mountain's top, the Moon as people call it, hurting my eyes with bri...