Home by Spiros Doikas

Beauty without the beloved
Is a sword through the heart
Gabriel Dante Rossetti

Every house which is not my home
Is a house of sorrow
Every house which is not her
Is a house of sorrow
For she is my home of homes
She is today, yesterday, and tomorrow

And every brook, or tree, or flower
All beauty that would not know her
That doth appear on my sight
must fail to give delight

For each and every one of them
Serve only as a reminder:
that none of them is,
or ever will be, kinder.

Letterbox relationships by Spiros Doikas

I have conducted my relationships through letterboxes,
(words aspiring to eterochronous orgasms
marked by the obvious absence of both participants);
through stamps, in which the Queen
has been the sole receiver of my most passionate kisses;
through envelopes, that were my skin upon her skin
(carefully sealed and calligraphically addressed
as if a work of art: communication?)

I have conducted my relationships through letterboxes,
(always the sender but never the receiver)
Vainly trying to encode cerebralised affection
And through my diaries I have lived my life.
Have I “lived”, my “life”?

Epidermis by Spiros Doikas

Epidermis

Some of the most sublime things
Are plainly surface
As nobody would willingly admit

A scar, a broken tooth, a crooked nose
Hair: too long or too short
– pheromone compatibility –
Could draw the line between
Passion and indifference.

Love for the last time? by Spiros Doikas

[I wrote this in Manchester in 1996 and it is a poem that keeps moving me with the way it captured the eternal Liebestod theme.]

Love for the last time?

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

How is it possible to make love for the last time?
How can such mysterious intimacy be dislocated
into such unsuspecting indifference?

(Is it an anachronism of the soul?
A stale acceptance of unreviewed impossibilities?)

But still, how can touch evoke touchlessness?
How can wholeness be dismembered into separateness?
What has intervened between the last time
and the next time that never took place?

An answer, vainly, my mind strove to find
As, somehow, I felt confronted with a mystery

Even more profound than death.

You are not here by Spiros Doikas

You are not here

you are not here
and every flower I encounter
has lost its value:

it cannot be made an offering

to you

T. S. Helot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Gogglebox by Spiros Doikas (Parody of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

The following is a parody I wrote on T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and is part of my satire on the British.

T. S. Helot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Gogglebox

O quam te memorem televirgo!

Let us go then you and I
When the evening spreads out
Like a potato etherized upon a couch
Hence, in etherization, may commence holly communion
with the Couch Potato Union.

In the room women talk about Home and Away
Terry Christian, Chris Evans - with no dismay.

No! I’m not Prince Charles,
nor was I meant to be;
and I won’t have a big wedding on TV.
I’m just an attendant horde, whose vision
Is espoused to the television.

In the room women talk about Brookside
Pamela Anderson, Take That - joking aside

I have measured out my life with visions of the telly
precious sights of pneumatic bliss
gazes in inter-embracement,
aphiloprogenitive
and opticopro-
philiac.


In the room women talk about Top of The Pops
Neighbours, Cantona - chewing on their lolipops

Do I dare eat a leech? Do I dare suck a nipple?
I shall were the tackiest union jack trousers
and jerk off upon a ripple.

I have seen the sluts shagging in the showers:
I do not think that they will take more than a tickle.

We have lingered by the chambers of the screen
By screen-girls wreathed with screen-weed red and brown
‘Till human voices wake us, and we frown.