Omonoia to Makriyianni

It lurches through the twilight zone
that gasps in fetid midnight breath,
the driver an automaton in uniform,
the cables - slackened life-support
suspended between us and Lethe,
the streets grotesquely warped and weft
through canyons carved in drab cement,
where trapped souls whimper in distress
and balconies in silhouette bite slabs
out of a heaven cased in lead.

I get on at the sordid nexus*
where pornography meets press,
leaving amputated stories writhing on my desk,
one more passenger competing for a seat,
a moment's rest. We huddle in our hypnogogic
bodies, in our silences, in retreat from the machine's
duress - nymphs inside a clumsy yellow chrysalis,
in which we feign oblivion and crave egress.

As passenger-somnambulists grope absently
for keys, alight like moths discovering their wings,
or captive bats released, adrenalin returns to veins
on contact with the murky lanes, redemption is
the metal in my palm that matches an address,
a porch-lamp in a dingy alley, where a door
will open to me, where we numb the day's
abraded flesh with flutes of cheap champagne,
in thin blue light reflected from an epileptic screen -
minor actors in the city's heartless shadow-play,
subsumed into its all-consuming dream…



Athens 1999-2001
*Omonia Square, a traditional hub of vice and
(coincidentally) some leading Greek newspapers.