Bells of Service, Languages of Apprenticeshi

The “bells of service” are our inner voices that, at some point, get thrown out the window, turning into oaths, purposes, homelands—details of a tearless image, the drizzle of the breeze in foolish wars, the groping of shifting borders of hope, the burnt notebooks of knowledge, the prayer rope of these images tolls the bells of loss, the rage of our cells, the solace of a divine drizzle, and I carve again on the desk of my sky with my compass, my team that always loses...

Burn the complacent ships of yourself; do not search for gold in the yawns of sunsets, in the hiccups of bank vaults, in the applause from the Olympic podium, it walks beside you, dropping breadcrumbs into the labyrinth of Archimedes' naked mirror...

You resurrected the mistake in the mirror that breathes within me, and I made my homeland the woolen socks of your little voice; in the last bombing in Gaza, a four-year-old girl spoke to her slain little brother and covered him with his "teddy bear" so he wouldn't feel cold; that is what I have for a homeland today. I swore to it—to toll the bells of mourning, the bells of impact and delirium, the bells of overturning the day, now that the war-torn neighborhoods are filled with Our Ladies of sorrow, with dreams of a third-division League, I toll the bells, sculpting icons of your dawn.

I thought of pressing blotting paper to my ears, so I wouldn't hear the ink from these tears, but they knock on my door like a folk song and have found a pew to pray upon these bells. Do you know how many tears were lost in the translation of "I," in the refraction of "whereas"? Like heroes, they confused capitals with capital and helmets, circles with squares, barren bodies with infertile ones, and they mistook the pew for a pulpit...

The image in this photograph is salty—it is from your tear that was never rinsed clean in its light...

With fear as our common denominator, oh, what haven’t we swept under the rug of History? And when it decides to shake it out, it always places a small god as a valet, to lower skies filled with songs, old saints, and grandfathers of today’s murderers.

In this black Lent of War, there is a bell on the "blackboard" of the computer that must absolve us by counting the children's souls in our sky...

The difficult times require water pistols because there are brushstrokes that have committed suicide in the detail of their own beauty...

Country, villages, verses—a little sardine swallows a shark.

TANIMANIDIS April 2024