Hip with a View
I came to Teos Romvos’s books immediately attracted to their sprawling vivid tales of Exarcheia in the 70s, 80s, vagabonding characters round the globe, through today; free discoveries found in translation, fresh understandings of solidarity imaginings.
Windings of super fruitful everyday, spectra of intimacy ideas pushing back against oppression, discrimination; entertainment as education. Teo’s writings manifest as accessible queer elixirs of humble and lyric, banal beauty adventure erotics, do it yourself together love letters in motion; expressive existence as coaxing exchange.
I wrote to Teo and he replied, inviting me anytime, suggesting I meet a friend I was already in touch with pictorially online and we travel together in the spirit, string-type constellations. Happenings. And there’s Τρύπα, the zine periodical Teo and his friends including partner Hara created from an independent publishing house Octopus Press, apparently suggestive of life ways too boundless: (politically) vital, risqué comics of biting, blurred poetics prompting gut reactions, signs of timeless.
I met with Teo and Hara at their treehouse place on Ano Syros with a visiting friend, where we shared amongst languages all mixed up, postcards and views, cats, spanakopita and salad, crossing all over contentedly earthed from the lusty day (steps, sea, speedy coast to inland drives with honey, fishes, ice cream, topless rocks, grandmother castles, coffee, friends artworks in olive groves, ancient graffiti, stone thrones, enfant terribles, muse murals, prickly pears, non-existent galleries, critics, coolness, muscles, pogo dancing: surreal nature zones,) freedom flourishes.
Teo and Hara involve themselves in sustainable permaculture too and most recently, an eco-culture preservation project across the cycladic islands to halt the effects of mega tourism, taking it to the state. Creative, researched diplomacy embracing endangered collaboration; street stories, nature magnetism, pragmatic romance, wild community.
filia!
Danielle Zorbas
daniellezorbas.com
Γερμανία 1971-72, μεταξύ Φρανκφούρτης – Αμβούργου
UNTITLED
The girl hooked on
one morning
at the beginning of the year,
at the canal…
She was wearing on her left ear
two earrings,
metallic turquoise wings
and cobalt blue.
Her hair bobbed,
silver dyed,
with black roots.
Two police officers were slowly rowing
and approached the sailing body,
they pulled her with a gaff
from the collar of the beige fur men’s jacket
and led her to the shore
were the bums gather and drink.
At the time they were quarreling,
next to them many emptied bottles of Schultheiss beer,
for an old story apparently,
bells from bikes were hearable
passing on the dirty path.
Some others helped too
and pulled outside the water the drowned girl
and then the bums who quarreled went silent
and gathered with the beer bottles in their hands
and watched speechless.
The cops put the the corpse into a nylon bag
and closed the zipper.
The girl’s still eyes
the expanded pupil,
the wide-open eyelids,
the agony of drowning imprinted
to the blurry cornea
looking beneath the translucent plastic,
the lines of the face
squashed deformed
the hair stuck,
an elf
a mask who voicelessly was chuckling to death.
Berlin 1989
(Το ποίημα περιλαμβάνεται στην ποιητική συλλογή ¨Ποιήματα Ανεμοδαρμένα¨ εκδ. Provocateur, 2019)
Τεος Ρομβος 