Gentleman Reading a Newspaper

Aristeidis Varuccas, Oil on Canvas, 1882

Leader of the brushstrokes, I demand to be seen.
The living room obliges with nakedness, if partial.
My pillows roar with hushed celebrations of a party
others have been taxed to bury. Others know best
how to bury. Pale as death stand the berry walls, aching
to tell their stories while they can. But their mouths are stuffed with
pictures framed in Olympic medal, a ficus, useless
clocks, ancient sculptures, petrified generations
commissioned to be gone. They gather dust all the same,
too blinded by the artist’s gaze to realize
one final party guest lingers on. It is I, the one who’s been invited
to some evening. My evening. Jammed the small canvas
with elegant purpose. My cigar fuming invisibly. An ottoman
creeps in, scarlet, where I could rest my crossed feet.
They are to be crossed. This is Athens. They’ve been told so,
as I’ve been told to be a stranger. No stranger to
the puddle-deep looks that sink my mustache to the floor,
creaking with wounds inflicted by my arm-chaired throne.
A king should never look behind, only to the right. My right
hand clenched to the family jewel, the most refined newspaper
speaking of men—as if I care. Glued to the bear rug,
they must take me for a Venizelos man. Owl-eyed bystanders
don’t care for any man. And any man can’t be a man
unless he’s a tinted picture on someone’s cherry wall.
My task is to be, and I will be—for beauty and for musk.
It feels so human to dwell on beauty, but the owls stare and mumble.
Cries of an unseen door I’m looking towards, yet there is no world
beyond the half-opened drapes in butterfly complexions
that I didn’t choose. Titles are for fools. My eyes can only read the shape
of a statue by the window carrying mother’s
wounded heart. She had the drapes closed enough
to be wounded once. Once was enough.

Vasilis (Bill) Fragios is an undergraduate student of English at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He works as a freelance English teacher and has been an active member of the European Youth Parliament since 2015. In the future, he hopes to pursue a career in drama and theatre studies— both as a researcher and as a practitioner of applied theatre.