#042: Bullets for Breria

(Moscow Hostage Crisis Part II.)

I.

 

“Companero!”

She says to he:

“Just how far will you take your love for me?”

“I don’t know.”

“What-don’t-you-know?”

“Is_love-just-another useless-word-in-english-to-tie-together-all-my longing_ and absolve the pastness of its evil woe?”

“Balkinera!”

He says to she:

 

“Why do you hide your past_from the demons in me?”

 

“Vasili!”

What’s there to say to you:

“Why does your name change like the seasons and who-do-you-as-of-lately-pray-to?”

 

“I’ll pray to anyone I can! God or human! Haitian Creole or oracle Greek.

My, mind’s prophesy has failed me lately_ and just this week, forgive bleak speak_

_I, cobbled together select bits of happiness!

On a box-car-ride returning me from the work camps_ I, whispered alone to the unseen you_ And I, placed a tourniquet on myself to impose broad side cessation most true_

_On the hemorrhage of wasted blood from a bleeding heart!

A crumbled contract clause well known_

_ It was iron to lead, finally stone, without intervention, things fall apart.”

 

A moan_then a grown, full blown!

Bleeding for the last four thousand years alone over things it was shown.

Flickering flame_take aim at what is to most just accepted with “solution unknown”,

The things you invested and my discipline tested_ no longer a puppy,

My dagger wolf claws are, full grown.

 

But at 29, I am half old,

and this bleeding stone heart, its passion is viperous, without intervention a thing growing too cold.

“A stone heart?! Tisk! I’m more like a Gold Locked Lion” she said,

“Just the other day I used electricity and repeated compression and brought a near defeated man_ back from the ranks of close to dead!”

 

“That man was me,” I said:

“And I’d just as soon you let him die you saved him out of pity!”

 

“Pity isn’t cute or pretty,

It costs time which is worth money, and I’m a working girl who has to engage the life of noire, the darkness dance, the champagne room, the filthy and the gritty.”

“You listen Man!_

_I’ll kick you out and cut you off for a hundred years of solitude_ you know I can_ if you talk like that again! Each time you are buried it will break my heart in secret, and then_ there will be nothing left of ‘We’_ but a fistful of poorly known Amerikanski poems and some songs to remind me!”

And I said, “When we-are-separated-by-the-fates_ I’ll sing songs to you in memories and in the next life you will find me!”

 

And the in the middle night they stole away again!

 

She carried me upon her shoulders with the strength of forty men!

Through the sand covered tunnel in the tavern floor.

There’s a door in the tunnel ceiling, and if you catch the right beat, there is a world in another life to come where miracles play out in the flicker of the lights on Ludlow street_

Our bar flight is a magik made realistic!

A fait accomplit.

The ultimate triumph of good over the cold and sadistic,

The-boring-the-bad, hopelessness-shattered, dissipated by the holding of hands.

An escape down an ice cage tunnel, heading off to last stands.

The tunnel is long, the light is a hopes flicker, we have to go quicker_ the sands of time combine with the near hellish nature of the dry heat made thicker.

 

And she whispers as we go:

“Just how far do you plan to take this bloody story, it is not a picture show? How many lives will you take to torch for things that went down_ just so very long ago?”

“They took someone from me,” I said, “the rest you surely know.”

 

“I know the story begins and ends in a City they call Moscow.”

 

“Life by life I pledged to fight them and that first injustice it did fully bind me.

If I acted like a human once, and act like it again_ its only because the fleeting smile I see you smile when your songs do remind me.”

 

“Remind you of her?”

The tunnel takes us toward the target, I say nothing as she surely knows the answer, she’s heard my vodka sobs, the beatings I have taken over things that did in other lives occur.

 

II.

 

It must have begun before Breria.

The terrors.

The closet hysteria, the dead-eyed-red-rat bastard rage,

Box car deportations for chornay in a continent sized cage.

Put fear in ya?

You remember bread lines,

I remember my lover’s pale-famish-face;

After two years in the gulag camps of that flat and deadly cold abyss Siberia.

Certainly, to point-the-finger toward the sky and let shots fly, pistol-pebbled-metal-mosquitos toward that most sadistic demon, correction, it is but Rubles on the wedding night traded for an abducted bride’s “protection”.

To avoid detection, an unwanted topless inspection via a meat-market-mangling-strangling  of hands and fingers; she wrapped her hair like Muhammadians do,

Limiting the potential for calamity most foul.

Not by much.

A bogeyman with bad touch, buried in his garden, a hundred, a thousand victims such.

We know what the head of the secret police is always in the nightly mood for.

Flesh and then murder.

He sends roses then takes people. A woman a night. A body hoarder, a mass ruin herder.

There was no ransom asked, when he took mine.

What’s too many? Nine? Or perhaps a thousand is fine, until yours are eaten, devoured vanished, there is no candle, no tomb to be watered by Parin moon shine.

To steal the moon as just a first start. When not even asked a ransom.

 

Who knows where she’s buried, after for sport Breria ripped her apart.

 

Cruel cigarette interlude.

Puff. Puff pass.

 

Pass me the proper weapons I will need to deal with devils now, devils then.

Take from me mine, break my life with the rape of my love, murder my only, my intended_

_ Cruel-beyond-cruel, powerful for brutalities power forsake. You may know well just-how-to-take, but you are a devil and I am a man with a gun and a stake_ and vile conviction of kettle-boil-burnt-blood-lust, must a savage avenging reality break!

AND VENGANCE WILL BE MINE, make no mistake_ no matter how many lives I must give, or eventually pile in wake of my take!

 

It’s not safe to walk the streets, day or dusk. Start smart, brave heart.

Wolves lurk in black government cars, carry you off and tear you apart.

 

               The tunnel terminates in an abandoned metro station.

We  are sober as clergy would want us to be, optundation is due to the size of the crew which is two, and the fate that awaits the acts we will do.

 

“Not much further now ‘til your glory_ hopeless fearless heart.”

“In each life, they will try to break us down but I won’t let them find me! If I forget what miracles we’ve already done to save our souls:

Sing songs to remind me!”

“You have a shower voice,” she said.

 

“Then it is you who will do the singing on the day that they strike me dead, they can kill my body and break my heart ten thousand times bled…”

“When you kill the devil, it won’t bring her back.”

“When god stopped interceding the world went on fire_ whole nations to smoke_ with war and with gas and their ashes watered the heavens via smoking black stack!”

“Vasa, I would love to see_ that first life when you were allegedly happy…”

“That was too many lives ago_ but if you kiss me for a moment I am sure by taste alone you’ll know.”

“What makes you think a bullet in the devil will improve the lot of man?”

“We don’t do this for man; man does what man can, a pittance, a sad offering, less than a little!”

“Is woman ever to blame?”

“Only in her coping with shame_ that devils emerged from her womb to ravish, usurp, enslave_ maim.”

“Women took what men gave, so I fire too at the corpse of this monster his body with bullets I’m seeking to rittle.”

“What if I asked you to turn away and run away from this kill?”

 

“So you can play martyr and I’m just your shill?! BLAT! Stick to the plan. We both know exactly how deeply these first tunnels ran. What you do for your vengeance, I do for my mine too but I still have many secrets I’m keeping from you, so along we go, angels and devils conspiring in the absence of the intervention or attention of the most high! Maybe if you were more man and me more woman_ we’d be afraid to die.”

“Last I checked I was flesh and I bleed, you strike me I shiver, you touch me and I smile and put on the trappings of need!”

“When the devil is murdered,            there will be more in his ranks.”

“Then we’ll have to kill many a devilish hoard.”

“You’ll never get bored?”

“Use your magik! Bring her back! I tire of lectures what points are you hoping you’ve scored!”

“I do what I do, first for my mother, but I still believe in the lord.”

“Believe you want, that’s your right. You saved me that night in the thick of the grey, in the blackness of endless existence called living in night.”

“I do only what I can.”

“You’ve never faltered before each time I hoped that you’d ran.”

“After Breria’s dead, what’s the rest of the plan?”

“I’ll buy you a dress, we’ll go to the opera, and I’ll speak poetically of Peonies bloomin’.”

 

She says to me, “I’m more happy than free,

But you can’t shake my faith in the goodness of all that is human.”

 

 

 

 

 

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