Thursday, August 8, 2019

Theodoros Chiotis - Physics of surfaces

Theodoros Chiotis is a poet and literary theorist. Amongst his publications are Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015), Screen (in collaboration with photographer Nikolas Ventourakis; Paper Tigers Books, 2017) and limit.less: towards an assembly of the sick (Litmus, 2017). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Greece, the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, Poland and Croatia. He has translated contemporary British and American poets into Greek and Aristophanes into English. He is a member of the editorial board of the Greek literary magazine [φρμκ] and contributing editor  for Hotel magazine. His project Mutualised Archives, an ongoing performative interdisciplinary work unfolding throughout the whole of 2017, received the Dot Award by the Institute for the Future of Book and Bournemouth University and will be published in 2018; he has also been awarded a High Commendation from the Forward Prizes for Poetry. 

***

Physics of surfaces I:  Practice makes perfect


you can hear the paint 
 being stripped off the walls
    the tips of the nails scratching at the boundaries: 
          the unexpected haunting of the
 neuro
                 logical system;
still 
     desire leers at you 
  despite repeated attempts to analyse 
family genes and environmental factors 
 as if it were a simple matter of finding 
   two adjoining rooms with windows 
      overlooking the lake. 

The residual evidence 
         of possibility 
                a series of images of the unwanted 
dead 
               on a spatter dash 
immune 
               to temporal friction.
   

***
Physics of surfaces II: Life on Mars
And, certes, the text most infallibly concludes it.
(William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.2.143)
I.

The eye pores over 
         the bodies shored up by the tide 
in an attempt to recalculate the possibility of taking
         liberties with 
the script;
         this will be a Palm Sunday tradition: 
the scattering of flowers 
          with dragon mouths 
opening 
          and snapping shut
without ever uttering a word.
Flebimus super illos.
          Is all this empty
clothing worthy of
          storage?

II.

         The I now splayed 
outside its own text 
         (or in the depths of other texts)
is carried away by currents 
         flowing without reason:
police interrogations
        are by default

 incomplete.