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.