1. Folly of Self
Ksorki:
Close my eyes, immerse myself in wells
Black secretions of tar in my tears
Like damaged makeup on a scarred face
I press the pen down, resurrect demons and
Tie myself to the mast while looking at the hallucinations around me of the chains that I carry.
I wander-
In the forgotten grave where revolutionaries sing and palaces burn.
All that I hold in my temples burst like petrol in the streets thrown by humans who are no longer controllable.
Definitions, myths and values spiral around me
And my judgements fuse with my actions
Like fragments of a rope
That, like a nail in the wood, stabs the larynx when the noose is tied.
Thoughts roam like hyenas that smelled food
Like an unholy omen, the bell predicts destruction
And I hover above like Janus
Transversing borders, connecting lengths and waves
While my spirit relentlessly touches my logic.
When my brain growls, it is reminiscent
Of a sabbath ritual in the wild that is just beginning,
The laughter of the persecuted who found a solution
In books of magical rhymes, written with the blood of the rebellious to make it flourish
Our songs are remnants of our doomed passage through nature
A breath that rips through the barrier that separates us
An etching on the pillar, a welcome to whoever comes next….
2. Like the Sunset
Stumbling in the night on the pavement in pitch black,
Filled with troubles,
In my mouth a worn apology that has now lost the battle.
Around me the walls that make up my blurred atmosphere,
The neighbourhood pub so I can rest my bones,
The entrance of the park-
All of them places I love, but they hold the smell of death,
And I don’t want to grow old here.
And I feel anxious, as if two eyes are watching me from the corner.
Exiled in a forgotten area,
I learn how quickly the empire rots from its own intestines.
I see the fingerprints of slaves on the bricks,
Under the decks, whispering songs
The colours may have worn out but the first brutality never leaves,
Together with Holiday, I am thinking that these trees look strange.
Still remain uncompromising, that’s what I want to believe
While they are staring at the ground I look to the moon
Expecting total destruction.
And just before I become convinced that fighting is useless,
I wonder whether Eyedea died with a smile.
Chorus:
And if we don’t manage to salvage anything,
We will fall proudly like the sunset (X2).
Verse 2:
Wake up in the terminal, one with the crowd,
In a state of confusion, stumbling on these steps
Like a silent fire in the rain, gasping for some sunlight
Without acceptance, constantly abandoned in this rusty valley.
An island in the island, a chain in my body,
I bumped into you on the street-
We spoke of nothing even though we were together for so many minutes,
Then a scared smile and a commitment to chill-
It will happen for sure, that is what we said-
As soon as the rain stops. Soon.
Friday night, I realise that borders are not simply geographical-
The barbed wires are simply their prehistoric version-
They cross human totalities in an invisible cut
And reproduce spaces separating every neighbourhood and area.
Govanhill on the map-
The stigma of the black sheep because the whites are scared,
The point of no return where myths abound,
We are hands in their warehouses and dirt on their boots, there it is-
This is the reality, this is how those who you designate as rubbish feel.
The anger that is ready to explode
Is inculcated in dilapidated homes with broken tiles.
Enactment of alienation in the society that drowned all the bright days.
Fuck it.
And I want to leave straight away but I am thinking of my goals,
There is no place for me, but I have a purpose.
Lift up the glass and drink till I pass out
A real toast to those who don’t belong anywhere, no matter how long they stay.
3. Screams from the Pit
Ksorki:
I am the waste of the connection between the spectacle and consumption,
An incorrigible vandal of your common opinions,
On the verges of knowledge, spitting illnesses,
The venom in your pie that you want to gorge.
I cook in my cauldron- the rotten apple in the womb-
My twisted nail that scratches your decorations in the night.
Demonic fetishes from my black list,
Emerge from the wires to cut off your power
To smash your business.
A glitch in their systems like Windows Vista
Machine gun mouth, Hasta la Vista
Corrupting the norm, burying the ambitious
In a paper tomb made out of their own promo posters.
Screams from the pit.
Trephination in your skull to exorcise the fake
A torrent on the uninformed with a never-ending mindframe
A mournful vertigo,
They try to fill their void with everything that lacks inspiration,
In front of their corny “dogs”, I unleash Cerberus.
Screams from the Pit.
They became addicted to the image, and forgot about the essence,
They diss the powerful until they manage to enter their living rooms,
I turn up in their dreams and disseminate doubts
With a sickle up my shoulder to break all records.
Opposition to the bastardised aesthetic
I shit on our common heritage and on your “shares”
In a crowd with an attention span that doesn’t even last a minute
We are not bros, nor even acquaintances,
I bring the splaterfest in their disgusting ears whenever I let loose.
Chorus:
This is not digestible, if you don’t know hip hop just vomit it out
This is Second Nature and it is infallible
If you want, hold it, and if you don’t, forget it.
This is Trephination in your brain (X2)
Bones:
Screams, bemused but plain, makes sense that they don’t do what you want,
I X out the boxes that you check since my beginnings, while others put it in the titles
Of their collaborations. Forbidden writings that survive the flames, osmosis of feelings
In a world with zero tolerance, you’ll catch me in the road of visions with my vocal cords
As my only weapon, or (catch me) with my fist up high, and a passerby throwing 2 pennies in the air before I go to work-
Inebriated, in this theatre of the absurd, survival trades places with sense of pride
Blocking everything I saw, anything coming out of my mouth looks like a hopeless try for truth.
My tongue is a lancet, cutting the fairytales
When I’m talking about trepanning, I’m exercising my surgical precision
An old practice that was passed through the ages in discretion
When I’m talking about trepanning, I’m talking about releasing my spirit
From blood, no matter the colour of the skin
Walking slowly on hot coals, the feet get scorched and become bare,
Let’s see who stands tall but mournful.
Forget it, no serious food can be easily digestible in the stomach
Toss it if you want.
It’s a shame, losing your interest with every step i make, your forbearance
In this ugly grey picture, I’m enjoying your guilt as if you were
A victim and I’m portraying a fanatic partisan, blaspheming with lewdness
Before I realize the death
Fuck it, immaculate pencil before it carves on your forehead what it hides.
Keep it if you want.
And read me from the start, until the candle is extinguished
Other pages will exist in the same version
Hard to be loved, but impossible to ignore it.
3. Fossil
Ksorki:
Out of nowhere,
The waters suddenly dry up
Τhe ground splits like borders from the hand that spreads drought,
That vomits pain like dry plants burnt by a cigarette butt.
The dead remnants of a wound that closed but kept the frost within it.
Icebergs crash-
Underneath the surface dwell monsters which the land has never witnessed-
Climates become sick
When audacity transforms into empty carelessness.
Cuts-
Perverted and undefined-
Voices that sing in subliminal volumes the dirges of the mud-
Survivors of combustion.
Proof that forgetting is not enough to rectify matters
A blind urge towards barbarism
Because you hoped that you would harness your demons without pain.
Dimensions rip,
The age-old spawn of the unity between strife and peace emerges,
A mutated embryo which becomes ever larger,
The death that survived and returned, twisting intentions like an injection of rage in the vein.
Orders of submission from the totem
Explosions of tetanus, shattered jaws
The spirit suffocates, screaming endlessly from the muscle spasms.
The disease that became one with the blood
It grabs at and oozes from every pore
It observes and explodes suddenly like an ambush
The magic on the stone-
Those that are impossible to classify-
The forbidden.
Those that were carved, forged by the winds.
All the stories that I fearfully recount-
The stigmata of chaos turned to fossils.
5. Polluted Wisdom
Ksorki:
Songs of oblivion for the funeral of the wish
A curse etched on the walls of a prison
A promise that was forgotten in an explosion of anger
It is a matter seconds to trigger the relapse.
In the darkness of an impenetrible brain’s knowledge-
The fine line between hunger and the coming of cannibalism-
The destruction of logic and the retreat into ‘survival of the fittest’
A source of collective shame like a lunatic’s truth
The false pride of total surrender
Biting down on the worn out harness of eons
Tired jaws like an overdose of MD to avoid conversations
And when words lose their function as symbols
The new ritual becomes the brutality of guns
And the authority of inhuman laws for human lives
With equivalent teachings-
Purposeless orders and disciplinary techniques
Imprisoned in the asphyxiating space of ‘normality’
And for the sake of realism-
The meaning of tradition is two folded
The first is that of ceaseless surrender
And the second is so you get used to it, so much so that you begin to desire it.
6. Release
Verse 1:
I conjure spells that you can’t even imagine
Bring the pain for the people who don’t stop questioning
Like a disease, it travels from mouth to mouth
It will never sell out, but when it stops it’ll be remembered.
Unnatural stimuli for disturbed souls
Fuck punchlines, I build arguments
The elements of our situation are incomparable-
I speak about resistance while they pretend to be hardcore over petty offences.
It’s not enough to just shout ‘fuck the police’
While they break priests I break religions and nations.
[the word ‘priests’ in Greek is used to refer to weed]
Keeping the flame, even if it burns me
In front of fascism’s darkness
I create Songs of an Economic Migrant.
I do battle rap just to vent.
Explosion of passion in every sentence.
I look behind me- and see rappers in the distance
Since if they even try to follow my train of thought they collapse from exhaustion
From the first breaths-
I explode the beats I step on like land mines
Bringing the confrontational word and burn cop cars with flammable rhymes
That stay engrained like whips on the backs of slaves.
When I make my brain work hard, I cause floods.
Bridge:
It’s Ksorki…
It’s Sound Thief….
Verse 2:
Pupils dilate- I swallow poison and spit out images
A sword etched by furious winters
Bars are simply not good enough for me, I spit pillars.
Threats and cyclones that destabilise mountains
They weave universes and make the gods sick.
I learnt to be careful what I wish for
Because when I jot down ideas, the stars begin to fall.
And I don’t care about a crown-
My mother lost three kids before she had me
Tragedy preceded me but what was taken for granted changed
Because I came out enhanced with 4 brains in one.
In my eyes, she sees theirs.
In my veins is their blood.
I turn my eyes inside out and they talk to me about their day.
So what can you tell me?
While you are searching for some shoulders to lean on
I don’t need anybody- I carry another 3 inside me.
On the surface of the earth, an otherwordly phenomenon.
When I swallow my wrath I vomit war.
With a notebook of death and a pen made by Hephaustus
Myths in my fate render it inexplicable.
I cut Ariadne’s strand, stay in the labyrinth.
My dreams pollute the collective unconscious.
7. Zahir
Ksorki:
Formation in the dark-
A sudden emergence like the birth of a star
The creation of life is a superpower that I can never reach
She laughs, without compassion, while the sperm she dominates in her fire spirals in the frame like a super nova…
Immersion in her sunken stare, in her angelic body
A being that combined the divine and the deadly
She made the sun into her crown and the winter into a gown.
Her caresses pierce the skin like a stinger
Her kiss’s touch leaves etched wounds
Holograms of passion in an dark room.
First she will intoxicate to subdue you
Then she will undress you with an addictive technique
Starting from the clothes, button by button
Until she ends up ripping your skin apart, with a smile on her face.
How many worshiped her and died wondering
Blindly balancing on the tip of her charm?
An unbeatable youth with the aura of a Madonna
A universal image, a cyclone of ethnics
When she turns her shackles inside out
The identity melts in front of her smile
All of the power I have left is sacrificed for her star-studded embrace.
She, who broke free from her maternity
Proudly masturbating for her dead children
Universes dance interwoven in her hair
She finally forced all that is holy, to quietly bow down to her wishes.
screamsfromthepit. ξόρκι (δεύτερη φύση) // ksorki (defteri fysi) 