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.