Written on the walls

“I love poetry!” she used to say to me, all the time. Every single day of the week, every time I stumbled upon her, she would churn out beautiful lines like these. Then, with the usual sullen look in her face, she would correct herself involuntarily; “I love your poetry, you know! Not just poetry in general!” she gave a kiss at my cheek and left. And behind her figure, ruins, ruins, ruins. I was inexhaustibly in love with her. The very shadow that emerged from her well-formed body, her moves, the way her fingers caressed the ground and the sound her lips made when she touched my cheek, everything pertaining to her was just unrivaled. She was a very, very powerful wind, a vento (oh, how she used to retrieve all her knowledge of Italian vocabulary, she tried to pronounce words she has not pronounced in ages! I never had the courage or the attitude to tell her how funnily her lips moved when she tried to pronounce Italian words), a force that even if you painstakingly attempted to resist it, it swarmed over you, your existence, your essence, your longings and ambitions, and managed to conquer you, and reduce you to mindless, blindfolded obedience. Yet, you still lusted over becoming a part of her collection of tormented, fatigued hearts. I could give up everything had she implored me to. I could figure out multiple, imaginative ways to kill myself had she wanted to make a piece of art out of my death.
One day, she walked up to me and told me how extraordinarily exquisite my poetry was. I was enthralled once again by her choice of words. She carefully picked the words that would make me beg on my knees for a reassurance of my existence in her universe. She told me every single day how much she wanted to have poems written about her, by my hand. Oh, how little she knew! I had scribbled an insurmountable number of stanzas dedicated to her. I never had the nerve to show her how my artsy self felt about her.
“I want poetry about me!” she yelled with a joyful look in her face. People thought her drunk, but she was more sober than most. This elation was natural to her. She did not have to add alcohol to her words. She was an exuberant, high-spirited, funny person by nature. This is the main reason why I adored her. Her eyes had a different sort of gleam every time you gazed into them. They always reflected a different kind of abyss. And this abyss penetrated you.
“I will write poetry about you all over town” I said, intoxicated with amore. She looked at me for a moment and laughed from the bottom of her heart. “No, you won’t!” She offered her regular kiss at my cheek and abandoned the debris of my heart longing for another one. Her disbelief motivated me all the more. I wanted to prove to her what I could do, what I was capable of.
I wrote poetry, lines, drawings, faces and balloon hearts looking for their owners in the streets. On public, private properties, on everything that could be used as a surface for art. Elaborately, carefully, diligently, I scribbled lines for her. Not only my lines, no. There so many immense poets before me that illustrated female beauty in more imaginative and erotic ways. My work was insufficient to describe spectacular miracles of nature. Every single corner of this gray, industrial town was painted with love, with immense, immobilizing, laborious love. The kind of love that blooms even in the gloomiest of areas all around the globe and creates a depressing contrast with all the sadness and the misery emanating from these corners of the world. This was my love.
“I will write poetry about you all over town” I said. But what I truly wanted to say was, “I will write poetry about you, everywhere. I will write poetry on your arms. I will write poetry in the walls of the most squalid building you have ever observed. I will write poetry on every cement surface of this town, and let a flower hesitatingly bloom from the spot on which my words silently lie. And this flower will exist only for you…for your blissful smile.”

A slice of life to deter premature depression

The sun sets in a spectacular city in northern Greece.

Taken over a year ago, during spring.

Taken a year ago - having lunch by the peaceful sea.

A flower blooming in the darkness of a modern city.. No one is paying attention to it, but still it rises in beauty and grace.

Rock Museum, Munich. My special admiration for rock'n'roll makes this rather trivial photo special for me.

A bird, strutting freely and carelessly on the pavement, unaware of its special beauty to the eye of a passer-by.

This photo was taken at Nafplio a profoundly exquisite city in the Peloponnese. It is editted - this is why the branches are red.

This post is more like a nostalgic trip back to previous years for me. The years in which the photos were captured range from 2008 to 2011. It may seem like a short period, but during these years I experienced major changes both in my life and in my character. I have evolved for the better (I hope). I finished school and entered university. I turned into an adult. I have spent a lot of time thinking about people and behaviors and drawn my own conclusions. Generally, I have changed a lot and I have experienced a lot. I am grateful for what I've seen and for the people I've met and for the different situations we've confronted together, and hope that I will see, meet, learn more in the future.

Expose yourselves!

Picture yourself standing in front of a large crowd, a bewildered sea of faces that awaits every single word that may fall out of your mouth. For a couple of seconds, every single fiber of your being is lying naked. Every unique sentiment that springs out of your precious little heart, shows. This is love. Exposure.

Don’t be scared, don’t run away! Exposure is beautiful and intimidating at the same time. It’s an indication of power and weakness at the same time. Exposure is the power to give away all your secret weapons, all your smothered insecurities to someone else so you can have bits and pieces of love back.  It is a weakness for some people – trading parts of your precious life for instants of Eros. But…don’t be unsettled; expose yourselves!

Being exposed is the act of being bare-naked in front of someone who is going to be able to tinker with your feelings and weaknesses. You are not in the position to know whether they will caress your insecurities or drag them sick and half-dead out in the street. It is a game; a game in which you can be either equal or a loser. It is a risk; a temptation naturally difficult not to succumb to. It is the essence of our very existence as sentimental and fragile entities in this world; the profound substance of both happiness and misery. But, you can never earn seconds of happiness or seconds of misery if you don’t participate in this game; so, take a big breath, step to the front and expose yourselves!

Spectacles...

Lately, I've been going through a pretty strange phase. I felt apathetic towards life, too hooked on routine. My body and soul were both extremely exhausted, unable to greet the day thankfully, as one should always do. I am trying to get over all of this and be able to acknowledge beauty again. Beauty, not in the artificial way; not in some extravagant spectacle, but in simple things. I am generally a person constantly dissatisfied; I always crave more. This is good, the way I see it; it makes me evolve. I am grateful for what I have, but I know there is so much more in life than this.
I do not deem myself as some amazing writer that has the power to write about extraordinary things and make people think differently. I do not know if I want to be one, I am just writing for my soul. I need to save my soul from being haunted by demons, harsh memories, the abomination of the routinary city life. Writing is more like a need. Without it, my brain would collapse.
The reason why I am writing this text is not to persuade people that I am not a radical writer. My point was, that, lately, I've been trying to find bits and pieces of beauty in the urban erebus, as my blog itself suggests. There are always things that are so ordinarily, statically beautiful, yet they always manage to restore my faith in beauty, in its wildest forms, in its natural forms.
The colour of the sky at night, when it's cloudy, is a priceless spectacle. The fiery red color makes it look so unnatural, so out of place; as if a supernatural piece of earth rose, intimidating, obscure. It almost makes you want to touch it, to feel it in your hands, slipping, like lava, burning the wet ground.
The narrow streets, at night, with the trees leaning down and embracing the balconies, the ground, the people, are a classic spectacle. In the painful noise of the city, one appreciates this peace of mind more than anything else; a walk on the pavement rejuvenates our most humane and sentimental thoughts.
Sometimes, when I am in a car, I cherish looking at the world outside as it quickly flashes before my eyes, gone within seconds, abandoning sparse images in my brain, scattered, like pieces of a puzzle I will later put in the right place; later, someday, in my life, when I go away and I will have to keep images in my brain, so as not to forget the city; the city that welcomed me in my birth and embraced me with its people and the memories they carry. These are images not necessarily beautiful, in the objective eye, but pieces of an urban puzzle, a collection of slices of life so suppressingly interconnected, doomed to co-exist, and suffer one another, with all their eccentricities and ugly deeds.
Someday, once my life becomes a series of woefully identical emotions, images, events, I will take out those pieces of work, and remember those images that made me smile, somehow, when I lost all my faith in the world and in life. 

Light

 Light

If you hear someone weeping
with diamond tears and paper heart
stretch your hand and reach me
I am right behind you.

If night seems too long to endure
and the gods will not listen to your voice
keep walking into the endless tunnel
I am right in front of you.

If you fall and hurt your angel face
and your knees betray you and refuse to support you
keep your head high and you will find a ray of light
I am right above you.

The girl who went away

The girl who went away

Part One

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.” , Alfred Lord Tennyson

I picture me and her on a mountain, in some reverie, wild and free

Laughing and joking, smoking, drinking our worries away.

Her timeless beauty, the way she moved and melted, they captivated me

And If I sinned, gladly for her the price I would pay.

She stood at the edge of the mountain reciting heartfelt poems

And her eyes were shining with unbridled, honest joy.

My mind was blown, deprived of worries, anxieties and problems

As she kissed my mouth and tenderly called me her little boy.

Her memory is one of those that rejuvenate in the summer

When the smell of the sea and the grains of the sand form her pretty face

These times I’d drink and wake up lonely and desperate the morning after

Helplessly looking for this girl that inspired in me so many tales.

And as much as I’ve tried to lead this girl astray

From my fingers she slipped like a careless sun ray

Who would imagine that this girl would go away!

Part two

“I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that's real

The needle tears a hole

The old familiar sting

Try to kill it all away

But I remember everything

What have I become?

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

You could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of shit

Upon my liar's chair

Full of broken thoughts

I cannot repair

Beneath the stains of time

The feelings disappear

You are someone else

I am still right here…”, Nine Inch Nails, ‘Hurt’

I saw her again, on a cold winter night

When my heart was frozen and my feelings were numb

Her eyes pierced me, full of sadness and fright

As I looked at her with signs of some once powerful love.

She looked cold and her eyes were shining no more

And her smile was gone and her voice

Like a little girl that made a wrong choice

Was barely heard any more.

“Where is my little girl gone?” I asked her gloomily.

Expecting a careless, happy, pretty response

With a wild and excruciating force

She replied to me somewhat crudely:

“Who are you, what do you want, why do you talk to me?”

Shocked by her attitude towards her little boy, me

I told her if she remembered those hot August nights.

When I’d hold her tight and let her sleep in my hands

And she’d whisper to me “I hope this never ends”.

She waved negatively, and I tried to grab her hand

Only to see wounds, painfully red.

All her fears and insecurities, dreadfully fed

To the demon that escaped his lair under the bed.

I looked her in the eyes, that were blank, sad and mad

Tried to speak a word of love, but my mouth went numb

If I kissed her, she wouldn’t remember

If I loved her, she wouldn’t know

If I sang her songs, she wouldn’t hear

She is long gone, a memory dimly lit.

And all the poems she recited play in my mind

Like a song that hasn’t died of the typhoon of time

And I hear him say “For thine is life”

Then, why do I feel this strange impulse to die?

Part Three

“My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.” , Walt Whitman

A few months later, as I lay in bed

With a couple of diverse poems tangling in my head

I heard her name on the noisy TV

Clear and free, excruciatingly clean

“Emma Lee, a young beautiful girl was found dead

In an alley, after a heroin overdose.

She was a 20-year-old student…”

What shall I do now? Help me! I’m lost in dismay

How can I live with the fact that I won’t see her someday

Smiling to me, singing songs, playing in the sand with my hair

Reciting poems and crying for things she wished she hasn’t said

Drinking with me, emptying the bottle and dance in the moonlight

Embrace the sky with her hands, longing to fly like a kite?

How can I live while dying of so much torturing pain?

How can I live while my girl has silently gone away?

The Canvas

And as I walked down the street, it was dark, and the darkness filled my eyes, burderened my soul and killed my strength. I had to urge, to put my mind to work, and find a way out of this life that I never agreed on living.

When I was young, I bought myself a canvas. A blank, clear canvas, with no color stains on it. Not a single sign of interference. It was all mine to draw, to create from the very beginning. But from the very beginning, while I was still trying to figure out what to draw, I had instructors, tutors, people I never knew telling me what to draw. They didn't focus much on the content, but on the techniques. I never liked techniques. I am a lover of impulse, of spontaneity. I like using my heart, the only organ I need to be alive. What would art be, had I ripped my heart out and used cold logic? But, no. I was wrong. So they said. They told me I had to draw straight lines, not curved ones. Not a single drop of blue should be found out of these lines. I was to be persecuted and rebuked had I made a single, impulsive mistake. I had to be fully prepared, with carriages of knowledge in my head, with a notion of perfection without having experienced a single moment of mistakeness. I had to be infallible without stumbling, falling and getting back again. How could I be perfect? They all say perfection does not exist, but we all must strive to gain it. But how? How can you gain something that doesn't exist? I had questions. But all people ever did was moving my hand on the canvas and showing me how to do the perfect without having encountered the imperfect. 

Now I have a perfect, according to the general standards, canvas, but an imperfect dazzle and confusion.
Thus, whenever I walk down the street where the canvas store is located, I wonder, why did I let people paint the canvas? Why did I never release my hand from theirs? Why did I never try to be indepedent and let it shine?