O Economy Street

O, Economy Street, you are the picture of Austerity. With your burnt cars and barred windows. With your green plastic netting catching rotten rock from buildings under perpetual renovation. Shady characters in shaded doorways – young men with nothing to do and from nowhere. Sick kittens under parked cars. Old hump-backed dogs sniffing skoupídia, that is, garbage.

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Oikonomía Street in Athens. What a gift to a poet that idea, that street. Graffiti up past upstretched arms level. Graffiti between parked motor scooters. Smudged over window glass, obscuring the names of businesses and their discontents. Graffiti crumbling with the wall plaster, some artistic: rat’s ass, nude photographer, mop-head, clown-body, antifa slingshot-wielding streetwise warrior, group shot of rebetika musicians.

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O, Economy Street, who wants to walk down your street in fog or darkness? Tight street, one way on the down slope, slippery when in debt, austere stern street, corrugated spirit, returning to earth, stinking of bad faith. O, Economy Street, you’re still in the Eurozone and in the no- zone, zero-zone, though not on the same business page as the others in the zone. No credit, and you get all the blame. Kin to Lonely Street, all IMF’d up.

 

Eek goes the neighborhood, the oikos, the home territory. Oink goes the State initiative. First time property taxes ever to gobble up what’s left. Theft of the deposits of retired Greeks (called “haircuts”). Vulture funds. Government budget acrobatics. Financial crime wave – No medicines or gauze in the hospitals. No food for prisoners. So much unfinished housing as done-for (economic) ruin, skeletal remains of the debt boom.

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Uh.

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O, poorly translated street. The street is not named Oikonomía, as I thought. Instead, it’s a Greek surname, Oikonomou, and does not mean Economy. A most valued soccer player here in Hellas has that name. From likely wealthy enough of a family to have a street named after them, in the roughest most rundown street in the Athens neighborhood Exarchia. So there goes that poetic territory. Named for his ancestors.

 

Marble curbs dreaming in broken English. Still, maybe retaining a residue of that impoverished irony.