“Ladies and gen­tle­men vel­com­men; qui­et please; as you can see, that is, as you can’t see, we know not whether our com­pli­ant cat is dead or not. Right now, I would ask a mem­ber of the revered audi­ence to con­cede to pay­ing to the order of a reversed proof, a proof anti-poet­i­cal­ly lit­er­al (and not, one hopes, lit­er­al­ly anti-poetical):

What about you, my pret­ty, love­ly, come clos­er, ready?
ala uno ala due ala tre

(a cat is revealed com­prised of innu­mer­able phos­pho­res­cent d o t s)

Voila! The feline in love’s place!
to focus on it is to impart to it a form (manda­to­ry)

if not it pass­es to your left and right → right through you:
is your pref­er­ence to be enchant­ed into absence or to observe?

What are you wait­ing for?

Love, ooh, love is deliv­ered along this experiment’s inter­pre­ta­tion before a mirror
while the observ­ing eye is observed – no small thing by any stretch

if you are court­ing knowl­edge that already possess
you put before the will’s upper cut to volition

Who, though, can occu­py a view­ing plat­form from the inside,
and see, say, the invert­ed image: no one

since, in order for some­thing to hold mean­ing, some oth­er thing must hold none what­so­ev­er, a state regard­ing which, cherie, we lack all certainty

Unless the cat’s both dead and living!” 

 

The poems möbius, 0→1, ♪, O2 belong to poet­ry col­lec­tion Bel­la Boom (Pub­li­book 2011) and have also been pub­lished in Hel­leni­ca: Nov­el­ty With­in or Beyond Lan­guage: Anthol­o­gy of Young Greek Poets, (Athens: Gavri­ilidis, 2009)

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