Athens
"We should not build around the dead city, like ants slowly raping a corpse; where taxis shuffle about a tenement blocks, it all ought just be left to rot."
- so said the Eyes, overlooking Athens from the Acropolis, wishing this messy corner of the modern world was stopped, silent and unseen. But then, this fist of fingers itched with a different twitch:
"True, lives hobble about below this grandeur where, once, blind prophets gained visions from their gods. In the image of a sad old cripple - limping on only by creating clever tools - they foresaw this, our future. And then, shrugging, sailed the Styx to Hades, wishing they could no longer walk, no longer see, no longer feel. So defeated, they did not even dare to dream in vanity of haunting us.
"Yet, eyes, see deeper still than the underworld of a dead city, mourning what's crumbled. For even cast in scaffolds, the columns up on the hills of Athens have just performed their usual duty: to rule the mind and the fist by visible beauty. A cheap trick of an architect! Or consider say this, their celebrated lie: that democracy and the gods can live together, that neither one nor both in their mix must die. Yet the vast hands of history wear rings made of cracked skulls, a billion for each finger; caked in blood, and labelled with the names of defeats and disasters, added to daily.
"And now new Athens sprawls below, ugly and unbold. Where once great gods thundered, slept and strolled, see a postcard picturing a palm-tree, here in this graveyard of land, without clarity or conclusion, and whilst the lightening bolt is unavailable to fist, admit that some form of record is still best forged by hand."
- so said the Eyes, overlooking Athens from the Acropolis, wishing this messy corner of the modern world was stopped, silent and unseen. But then, this fist of fingers itched with a different twitch:
"True, lives hobble about below this grandeur where, once, blind prophets gained visions from their gods. In the image of a sad old cripple - limping on only by creating clever tools - they foresaw this, our future. And then, shrugging, sailed the Styx to Hades, wishing they could no longer walk, no longer see, no longer feel. So defeated, they did not even dare to dream in vanity of haunting us.
"Yet, eyes, see deeper still than the underworld of a dead city, mourning what's crumbled. For even cast in scaffolds, the columns up on the hills of Athens have just performed their usual duty: to rule the mind and the fist by visible beauty. A cheap trick of an architect! Or consider say this, their celebrated lie: that democracy and the gods can live together, that neither one nor both in their mix must die. Yet the vast hands of history wear rings made of cracked skulls, a billion for each finger; caked in blood, and labelled with the names of defeats and disasters, added to daily.
"And now new Athens sprawls below, ugly and unbold. Where once great gods thundered, slept and strolled, see a postcard picturing a palm-tree, here in this graveyard of land, without clarity or conclusion, and whilst the lightening bolt is unavailable to fist, admit that some form of record is still best forged by hand."
posted by Fist at 01:03
