No Parole by Eva Xanthopoulos

A dolphin caught in thick fishing lines.
An ocean lacking a tide. A boat lacking
sails. A seagull lacking wings, a
feathered tail. No sense of direction.

An innocent prisoner.
50 Years. No chance of parole.

He's the dolphin, the ocean,
the boat, the flightless seagull.

Nowhere left to go. Running in place.
Staring confinement straight in the
calloused face.

A fisherman killing the free. An ocean
drowning a child. A boat sinking and
taking everyone down with it. A seagull
stealing a fish from a starving-to-death soul.

The guilty nomad.
A lifetime of walking chain-free.
These murderous hands
don't get to touch those
cold metal prison bars.

He's the fisherman, the ocean,
the boat, the selfish seagull.

Nowhere left to go. Running in place.
Living a life free, in the wrong name.
Staring this freedom mirage straight
in the calloused face.

Cocoon by Eva Xanthopoulos

Cocoon your grief with a piece of coral reef

To distract yourself with sounds of the sea

Stop blowing your angered winds my way

I'm not your sun and I'm not its rays

You rain, contain pain in inflated gray clouds

You expect a rainbow to pierce through you

when I can't even keep my own skies sane

Blame me all you want

It is in your self-created

spider webs in which

you are caught.

You are the moth and the spider

An arachnophobia-induced recluse.

You run run away from yourself

And run run to me as if I'm an angel

responsible for taking you out of

the jail cell you have built

to dwell in, letting all this hell in.

My arms can only hold so much

And you clutch onto me with everything

you have. Your feet sink in this muddy

land because you can't stand on your own

You tell me I'm the reason for making you

feel alone. You tell me I'm the cold soul

that has frozen your heart in place and with

a chalice you claim, I chip away at your heart

You tell everyone I'm evil, that I'm crazy, far

from civil. All these lies your quivering mouth

continues to spill have filled my ear drums

and inflated them to the size of pregnant crescent

moons. I take a strand of your cocoon and pull on it,

watch it unravel. Your grief is released and you

always put it all on me. It's as if my forehead has a

florescent tattoo speaking to you "Weight of your

world lifted by this young lady" On a side note:

"Don't bother fixing yourself, your emotional

health... it's all up to her to fix. No work is needed

on your part -- all you need to do is lean on her."

Do me a favor and mend you own heart before

you come knocking my door down asking for mine.

You claim you're fighting for me but all you do is whine

You guilt trip me into thinking you'll drink yourself to

death. You threaten that you'll expose my secrets,

All the things I've ever told you since we first met.

From day one, you hired me for a job I never even

applied for. You started a war when all I ever wanted

was peace. This love you have for me isn't a feeling,

it's a disease. This God, or Evolution or nothingness

that created me, never made me for the sole purpose

of making every person I cross paths with happy.

Cocoon your grief with a piece of coral reef

To distract yourself with sounds of the sea

I'm not your distraction, not your escape.

Find yourself, boy or dying alone will be your fate.

Information on Eva's Chapbook Water Walker can be found HERE.
To buy Water Walker visit: HERE.

Mid July Night by Eva Xanthopoulos

I was a mid-July night
Snowing during the cloudless evening
The fog, an illusion, my curtain
To hide the naked I feared to expose

I was hungry for the unknown I had to know about
So I asked Polaris to feed me the sky
I promised I'd stop snowing and rain infinite
amounts of blinding sunshine. I used to freeze over
the mini lakes that filled up my tear duct wells
To make mother earth fear me for
the numb within me she could
not imitate nor see. I laid on the equator during my
sleepless nights and gazed
at the stars. Africa now Antarctica,
Antarctica frozen over further
The little dipper lost himself in the big dip

A cold soul freezes more than the inner skin
cage it lines, it freezes everything it touches

so they say, so I told them to say

All my lovers, a thing of the past. They lay
in their human sized ice cube caskets asking
for a way out, an escape. I blew them a chilling
kiss laced with ill fate years ago. Their starving minds
drank the dry wind as if it would moisten their
inner droughts. Little did they know, my kisses, these
diseased wishes would only contaminate their thoughts.

Polaris fed me the sky once a upon a time. Little
did he know I was a heart eater, soul devourer,
life absorber. I fragmented a promise broken,
its shattered shards still sting like bee stingers
piercing through sleep lacking eyes, awakening them

I never rained that sunshine, only snowed blizzards
Mid July to late. Summer is mine. Cold soul
winters are man-kind-mother-earth's fate.

Information on Eva's Chapbook Water Walker can be found HERE.
To buy Water Walker visit: HERE.

Interview with Eva Xanthopoulos

1. Who are some of your Influences? Pablo Picasso, Edgar Allan Poe, E.E Cummings, Gandhi, Buddha -- the list can go on forever.

2. What styles do you like to incorporate in your writing? Surrealism, eroticism, romanticism, free style.