Nikos Tselepides

It Is Not Anything Else

It is not the sky or anything else
That' s to blame
If you let it be blue
It will turn bluer, it is not anything else
Than your bluest moments alone with me so far
A distant saxophone from another apartment
Three young girls playing hopscotch
And shades of moments from your teens by the sea

It is not the glistening water on your breasts
As you get out of the sea and climb the rocks
Nude, to my part of the beach
And the sun plays with the light on your golden wet hair
A couple of pine trees and some young birds
Know that summer will soon go

It is not your waist of a lioness and the weight
Of your breasts, nor the sound
Of your heavy breathing as you reach the top of the steps
And face the new-born world like a mermaid come from the deep
Gaze searching the distant shores and islands
Legs poised on the sharp grey rock slabs

It is not your scream "Take me apart if you wish
I am totally yours", nor your salty drops of perspiration
Running down your body to your ankles and to earth
I count my fortune with both hands and ten fingers
Each time I caress you, the waves are blue and electric
And will turn bluer and burn me when you give yourself

It is your voice on the phone, from ten thousand miles away
To hear you is to touch you, to touch you is to be
It is not anything too complex, it is merely we two, talking.

Nikos Moshovos

The Game

The Quintessence of the moment remains.
Nothing else.
Neither the tears from your eyes
nor the laughter of the childhood.
No hartred frightens you
if love looks you in the eyes.
Occasionally through the centuries
it is the game that determines.
The Act went by
it became a distant fog,
memory of the unsaid images
treasured up in the chest of the heart.
The Joy of the moment remains.
When little Janus sings
nobody listens to the hymn.
What he left behind is what was left behind
Nothing else through the centuries
it is the game that determines.
A trivial mask he wears
he’s not scared of its shell.
Alien arrows, unrecognizable paths
forgotten in the oblivion of the past
Emotion dead.
Absolute Zero, the times goes by.
Dreams of seashores, illusory paintings
Recorded in the book of his memory.
He only seeks one Word
in the eternity he aims
like a faraway star he illuminates
it is the game that determines.

Setty - Sotiria Lepida

Bridges

He talks of a new one he found,
The boldly crossed stone and metal
Figuring out the new age of our steps
Towards stagnant pauses and blue lights
And he is content, he says, with steel
That harshly penetrates any clamor
any blunt, frank, daylight
On the other hand
I look far from the vast city as
Sharp, frank darkness
Turns its face away
Shaped like a gem
cuts through our blue ways
Cuts, cuts
'Till we're Silent
Under blue lights
Like blue bridges

Maria K. Thanopoulou

Prudent Poetry

I am covered
the poverty
and the misery of
my shaking mind.
I have decided
to carve
with flowers
the pillars
of furtune,
which adore
the fruitful
prudent poetry...

Maria Tsatsou

Song Of A Rattlesnake By A Soft Spring Night

Krotos is a rattlesnake
he’s unsociable and odd
Children see him and trot
away, saying:
"what an impossible playmate
and so cold".

Krotos feels the cold no doubt
he’s no beauty all in all.
With company he’s silent
Or at most he nods.
But at night when he’s lonesome
he composes odes,

To the frog-lady of the river
Hence the verses he sends thither
such as those:

"Phryni, so young and pretty
flattered but aloof,
went by the other evening
without a look.
And disdainful and haughty
mounted the cart

of that ghastly man Toadoroff,
which wrang my heart.

Ra-ttle-Ra-ttle-Rattle-Rattle
Ra-ttle-Rattle-Ra

You will never find a lover
half as steady as tha(t)"

Lemonia Mourka

Explicitness

Just us
tonight
bizarre spectators we became
of a bizarre moonlight:
a slice of fire in the heavens
that a diaphanous line
quickly extended to the zenith of the night..
Just us
with eyes wide open
souls full of miracles
we touched the essence of the world.
Nobody else:
indolent students of life
they slept their deep sleep
in crystalline dreams
disclosing before the daylight
everything we've salvaged through the night..
As long as you can see with my eyes...
all the human and divine miracles,
to me,will promptly be explicit.

Aspa Papakonstantinou

As A Poet I Am

Like this I pass my time
as a poet I am
I pass my thought
with words inside them
in the silence I talk
and I fly to the top
when I have a tear
I see the sun near
the clouds and the rain
everything in my pain
and my words
are the company
inside my thoughts
are my flowers I pick
one after the other
as I make a boucket
of roses rather
to give to each one
and really sea the sun
and really see me
since I am a poet thee

Kostas Hrisos

If I Ever...

If I ever find myself at war
As the aggressor, as the victor
Would I torture, maim and kill?
Would I burn, rape and pillage?
And I enjoy it all?

I' m begging you, please,
Never let me find out.

If I ever find myself at war
As the victim, as the loser
Would I perjure and collaborate?
Would I betray my friends
To save myself and family?
Would I just desert?

I' m warning you,
Never put me to the test!

Dimitris Varos

Mind Games

I am a waterfall in the desert.
A rain from a cloudless sky.
A well known but unborn child.
An insistent experience
that you never had.

I play mind games with your brain.
When you strike the keys and remember the sea
I come as indefinable memory.
When you look at your watch
and the time has passed
you feel me like a fleeting hallucination.

I play mind games with your brain.
I’m nesting behind your eyes.
I’m ranging through your dreams.
You are finding me in all of your desires.
In all of those are absent from you.

I play mind games with your brain.
I stand in the places that you cannot reach.
I exist where you cannot touch upon.
But I am what you always waiting for
I'm what holds your life on.

I play mind games with your brain.
But I swear this is not a fun.
I feel unbearable loneliness.
Because I do not have a body
And you, that you can, refuse me yours.

Dimitris Lyacos

VIII

Final concept harbour which has
broken there where it crumpled our faces
there where ikons soaking and dissolving
scoured the rusty beds
with haven sleep and holy candle fading
keeling over amid the wailings
the friendly hug which turned to stone for ever
in a vein where death drips
dispirited nods and flesh-consuming intercourse
and embraces on the slighted
shape of the saint who is baptised in fever
and empties our bodies' skins
and discharges black ruins of the tissues
entrails
the fir tree's primary jewellery then
as we were nestling below the turf
of the dream noiselessly
in the root of the sickness which was opening
a road and a door leaning tilting into the darkness, light
sure prophesies, whirlpools drowning the promontories
and the place was becoming wrinkled without pathways
and we were casting anchor in our innards
and chains were harvesting the senses
and the affections are shattering
and the forefathers used to navigate in the expanse of madness
close-bound bundles being pressed together into
the pattern of condemnation indescribable
shadows and rent apart
and the mercy which was granted them of asphyxiation
while the pulley-wheel of memories spins red-hot
the un-nailing of my boyhood years
and the funerary gifts which uncover the frenzy
crumb from the stars
coffins under the rain
forests inclining into pubic hair
lonely orgasms crippled lovers
and the unique desolation of their lustful mouths

Dimitris Palasis

In My Confining Shoes

In these shoes confining me
a lot was written
the legs
were burdened
the friends
burdened like ice
fallen in the afternoon...

In my closet
I put thyme
from my hands
a red place
timbers pointed
and on them
leaves hiding
some yesterday...

Something new
something
fried fresh
today...

Imprisoning Lions
keep my thoughts
untouched
before they crystallize
in the distress of pain
the pain
of the afternoon...

Alexander G. Tanaskidis

Mourning

She wakes again to a day
Where the air is spring-drenched with daffodils
And all the earth is rain-softened, flexible.
She envies it while she wonders where winter has gone
And when exactly the dark buds
Will begin to pierce through her white and deadened flesh.

Stretching now, she yawns
And feels her muscles groan,
Mourning the effort of another day, another life
In which nothing real can happen.
Nothing ever does.

So she waits for a moment before opening her eyes
And, in the flicker of time between sleeping and waking,
Strains her senses towards an unfamiliar sound,
Perhaps the sharp surprise of routine confounded.
But there is only silence
And she acknowledges instead
The cool caress of dank air on skin, the loneliness of blood,
Sunlight being hidden.
Although still she wonders

And is therefore almost unprepared
For the room's stark revelation when her eyelids finally flutter open
And she sees then what she sees always:

A wardrobe filled only with dresses;
A half-empty shelf; a photograph.

Dimitris P. Kraniotis

Fictitious Line

Smokes
of cigarettes
and mugs
full of coffee,
next
to the fictitious line
where the eddy
of words
leans against
and nods,
wounded,
to my silence.