_____________________________________________________
To Volodya Tkachenko
*
The day was buzzing, missing honeycombs,
and the linen hang on the ropes,
like notes in a classical score,
guess: was it Bach or underpants?
The air was handsome, advanced,
but indescribable yet,
it smelled like dog shit and fake IDs,
and the apple of sin that could rejuvenate…
Shaking off ash of an accent,
I fell asleep in a bower by the creek,
I saw my motherland alive in a dream,
a free, no one’s land.
Autumn brought sunflowers that put
jeans skies with fringes on,
nowadays scumbags become poets
and never come back home.
(23.08.2013)
*
* * *
*
The sun slides down Rostov on a screeching tricycle, and forever
the reflections of crosses move like a spoon-bait in the river,
a sunset bell is chilled with toll over the horizon’s fishing line,
here the Russian God took the bait, and the clouds came back from the front line.
We’ll bring him home and let him swim in our bathtub,
Well, my lord, wash yourself in the promised water, rub,
the net cuts the scales, and а hundred-jaw round muzzle eats up
the soul–aren’t you scared, my god, to hang there between smelt and tittlebat?
To hang two meters above the ground where nettle blooms down there,
but there is no beer in the pub, and one is left just to believe in beer.
(26.08.2013)
*
* * *
*
I take a placebo of the prayer
with the taste of rabindranath cahors,
finally, mushroom razors
pelt looking for a newly discovered throat.
I drive a two-pail coupe sedan, a convertible,
I am ill-tempered for that matter,
which is quite understandable,
taking into account current patterns.
Feathered carcasses sing
the cover chanson from Zita and Gita
and evil airbag pillows cling
stuffed with angels’ feathers in my two-seater.
The fingers smell of Sistine Chapel,
of a fresh cut finger and contagious doom
in a white car, as white as a sample,
indistinguishable from a black or red one.
*
* * *
*
*Theodolite sensed me with its tongue
under the skies of Barcelona,
the day grew as a draft
and the clones were waking up.
From dusty canvasses and arras
they came out in an anxious doubt:
why do you, Martian son of a bitch,
shake your tripod?
Theodolite is looking up to
gilding sprayed with an enema
and sees a shrimp thursday
crawling into a bologna saturday.
If tapas is a sort of canapé
in a flaky body under one shirt,
we, pierced with a plastic spade,
will meet in a store-room amidst a crowd,
and a bribed memory will help us pass
smuggled grain of sense through customs:
red wine can do anything, but alas
it can’t turn white.
(2013)