Verse 1-

I said “You’re cute,” on impulse

She said “Your face makes me wish

That I could sculpt”

Tri-lingual flirtation

Without deliberation, my mind to hers

As the moon began the Earth to stalk

“Tell me your tale as we walk”, I said

“You don’t understand what you’re asking me to do,"

She said nonetheless free of hesitation;

The warning aborned for me

"Are you sick of telling it?" I inquired

Her eyes slipped to mine's orbit

"No, but you may be sick in the telling."

I thought there was room enough beneath

Her self-possession for our mutual protection;

Just how dire can one's story be?

There was something if not demonic there

In her aspect then something which had survived

The devil's company; her scent emanated with such

Sweetness suggesting that here was a sweetness

To have been appallingly tested. Tested

But by no seeming means bested

We danced around for a time

Playing Coltrane and Dolphy of the wits

But with every small world lost, I'm sure

She saw that bigger request fulminating at my lips

Fear, desire, anxiety and sympathy: I did not

Know what emotion to most stockpile behind my eyes

But she took pity on my curiosity, and began, like this:

Verse 2-

"Go back far enough in the history of my house

You find my ancestor with marble knife sculpting the Nike;

At aged 5, on the Columbo in my first pair

I got a ticket to see the world from a man who played there

I don’t know why, but I didn’t cry, when even to

The cyclade sunlight my hair was tied around to make me blind

For ten years, or something thereabouts

I returned no closer to my parents than the light of their dreams;

My locks, dark and fair, cut; erasing all air

Of a girl who might be playing with the doll those locks now wear

Their Matryoshka lady gazed into my eyes

“You’ve been sold” she sighed, to my heart blood-dry:

“Aphrodite koritsi” became “Aphro the Rob”

Aged 5 I left home, aged 5 I got my first job

And if I worked not, I’d be kicked, given no dinner plate

But seeing the girls the men loved, I preferred their hate”

Chorus-

When I was but a hungry child

Each sleepless night would I whistle out this haunting tune

Nameless in my youth, now I’ve seen that it be baptised “The Theme of the Fate Changing Blues”

Did I allow myself be saved?

Or did fate that single path pave?

Fate, how I hate you

You poor stereotype of a workman

Verse 3-

“So yes, I guess ambition makes you look pretty ugly

A doll wanting nothing more than to fight her doll’s condition

And to my gnashing, thinking resistance they found its only interposition:

They gave me family again

Greek at birth, then Bosni, then Belgian at eleven

The ‘daughter’ pathetic, adopted, abetted, and deadened

By love given two children, by slavery their third, and there

I did see evil and insanity made up elegantly to respect

Unchained, touched and petted as I was blessed by adolescence

Every moment until then I prayed for the last with my next breath-

Do not wince, it cannot hurt

This pain too familiar

I spited them even as I was violated, educating myself

Of their home library whose worth was to be bought

Untouched by the two-part Sonneillon or their children

I read and read, this defiled queen her inner kingdom building

From her own bones made her bling; but when I

No longer could keep my dying of mind belted

My tears became my secret’s vehicle, before a teacher

Of course, this convict of their guilt endured

The disbelief that was her witch’s wood

And that “Don’t leave me!” I called to the unfierce good

I hate now as only one who once loved so deep ever could”

Verse 4-

“They loved me, my teachers

But not love only can save you

I was saved not by those love songs

Blasted on board as I was ferried again the Med along

Again I broke my prison for a prison

Clawing up an abyss that would make Milton proud

And make Milton shake; yet the shake I drank

And made the broke ground quake in its African sun bake

I was the moral caveat of a Sahelian diplomat, by he gripped

Til I was liberated by the Childhood of Egypt

Two years thin, of those fifteen thick, I returned

To Thessalonik surely God’s most favoured trick

Oh mama, oh papa!

Oh mama, oh papa!

I am a woman of many endings

And the ending so much the worst:

To know how fouled I am

While this sits unknown to the unversed

I’m in the underworld as I’m on Earth;

Every tree, building, man and child

Reflects down in the level of the sea

That is the world; two at once, now, to me.”

So tested was my compassion in task

This monument of temperance before my empathy

I could only move to ask “What are you now?

And for letting you be so, what are we?”

She said, “I guess I am an artist; deadened by providence

I work to free the spirit from the matter of me.”

She has undressed me: my spirit wails

Naked of its chain mail

Before her eyes thanked my ear I believed

Against such darkness I could only fail, until

For the first time, with iris untilled

And quiet, she smiled and sailed the words

“Now, he-is-who-is-dressed-for-death

Apply your lips, and tell me your tale.”