The Prince Of Sunsets Poem by Niko Tiliopoulos

The prince of sunsets
split the horizon
with a violent,
yet calm, movement
of his indigo sword and
as his shape settled under my eyebrows
he said:

“Which is more precious?
Water or Gold.

Listen to the heartbeat of the lover as he sleeps.
What do you hear?
The music of life
or the echoes of the storm
in the lungs of the drown? ”

Proud may be the one who begs for love…”

“Don’t look at me my prince,
I am in rags and ashamed.
I divided everything
among the God’s meek
and I was left poorer.

I sold my happiness
for thirty pieces of rags
to wear them and hide
under the bridges
collecting the trash of the coachmen.”

But I was destined to change the world.
What went wrong? ”

“To learn how far you’ve travelled,
you need to know where you started from.”

wrote the mould one day
on my dirty plate.

So I followed my steps backwards,
in the hope to find genesis,
but they brought me to the sea.

So here I stand, once again, at your shore,
at the beginning of my circle,
and the pieces of the puzzle,
one by one are falling in place.

Who would have thought though
they would be so many?

The sand is transformed by lighting into a mirror
so the sky can gaze at its depth.

But who ever dared burn the sea?

I was sleeping all these years my life
and the dream felt like cherry pie
on the lips of my imagination:

“Everything is strange,
everything is beautiful
in the land of wonders…”

Once the tide sealed my nostrils
and I woke up spitting salt
like a foolish beluga
trapped in seaweed.

Clumsy acipenser,
no lie can fool your fate.
The Caspian sea that shaped you
is the one that will eventually kill you.
Your eggs will incubate
in the stomachs of well-fed money-slaves
to end up in the water, once again,
as worthless urban sewage.

Our cells swim in water;
all our secretions carry the sea,
and if our viscosity was not that large
we would be sipped by the earth.

From the day I woke up
my body,
I’ve been observing you every sunset,
curving the dusk.
But today that you spoke to me,
you reminded me of Alice,
whom I had forgotten
along with my dreams.

… silence…

Only the sound of the stardust
as it was hitting my shoulders.

The price of sunsets
slide his sword back in the scabbard
and as he was fading from my sight
I managed to catch his song
before it was wiped out by the waves:

“Which is more precious?
Water or Gold…”