Stone and Bronze

there in that churchyard
I remember the stink of rotting food;
the rubbery skin of the bread and pork,
the dead eyes of Cyprus potatoes
staring through black plastic bins;
a stench as strong as hunger
and just as ancient
as the full breasted domes of the church;
some watched in fascination
some turned away
as some ate through their nausea
taking on the properties of the food;
the stink, rubbery skin, dead eyes --
someone wept at the headstone of a parent,
there was the whispered talk of some monk
raping his ward; I remember
someone masturbating
by the bronze statue of Makarios,
and I remember at night in Nicosia
you could always find some emaciated man
in some corner masturbating,
emptying themselves out
into the city's concrete intestines;
or against the bark of a charcoaled tree;
wilting in dead hands
a penile prayer of
burnt offerings to the Greek gods
in a park after dark;

and I remember thinking
of Aphrodite in Anatolia -- where
they held her unique cult image as
the Aphrodite of Aphrodisias, and
how the ancients still whispered
their narrative flow here
to fuck away your fears, a dissolve
into the fertile sea, into the sunburnt
colours of stone, marble, obsidian
and the children of Aphrodite and Ares,
a collective of winged gods, the three Erotes
associated with love and sexual intercourse
that coloured the iconographic images
of the Anatolian goddess
to symbolise the three realms over
which she had dominion,
the Earth, sky, and water:
and I thought no wonder on these shores
fucking is the first order,
whether on stone or bronze
life just bent you over;

when the walls became too thin
and you had to get out,
or you died, became myth,
a semi-erect legend of discarded seed,
someone to avoid, or to watch
like a star at night; -- and I remember
thinking of astronomy's most popular myth
that the stars are all dead;
seen from the sky of the earth
like a silver screen that airs
only golden oldies; filaments, clusters
and their tombstone etchings
as we look up to read
their graves overhead
peering back in time
to the gods buried in
shadows of light in prescient shadow:
but every star we can see
is almost certainly still alive;
for the scientific odds say
that one star dies
every ten thousand years while
150 billion stars are born every year --
as microbes in the gut wandering in
from the intestines of the cosmos
multiplying and multiplying in fear
or in hope, immunity against loss.

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