#808

Fearless_Hopeless_Hearts 

        “Tell me storytime!” 

        She curls up on me_her ethonol engine exausted.

        I want to fly us_so far away: 

This cab is now a magic carpet for a story cabaret.

            Using-a-punchdrunk-kitten in the back seat of a  Breuklyn-southbound-gypsy as my muse. One doesn’t choose,

     _the muse they use. Or when.     

There were worse assignments.

Given to more cowardly men!

And my constitution is and always will be_a wide canvas for futurist painting_ 

My-heart-when-fainting_

Is grinding, then breaking it_causes Brighton to flood and post Haitian earthshaking: 

     My soul is for barter_sign the dotted line, 

I’m a phantasm now-shaking collapsing-and up for the tainting.

     Exsanguination! Being bled dry!    

 There’s blood in my eye,

 A mind game, that’s fine, but the mind can unravel before the right time, and the things it envisions; the things you complete; like a thousand lifetimes emptying out of your whispers_ 

_Like two shots in the dark_unloading my heart on the cold of the street! 

Vasa, she whispers:

 “Why so sad all the time?_Tell me a story  with Camels and Bandits and rhyme!- and keys strung to kites_ mix your biwinning antics and Arabian nights! Make more epic poems! Can-we-not-agree_the audience cannot swallow_ an endless account, as you wallow in all of your feelings for me.”

Starry night burns bright, I begin again:

I have the will!

 In a previous life she believed mostly in kill-or-be-killed. 

She comes from place_ So brutal, so base, frustrated, consumed by the men in her face, 

The following ointments, which vodka let boil to a brine of pure hate_ juxaposed with the partisan flame of  my zeal, 

 I’ve been reborn in a futurist gate.

 _And invested with powers to steal or to heal!

Absorb all of your pain_ and restore your ideals! And  you will open my chest with your fingers: And start spinning the wheels_ 

It’s Russian Roulette, the way that she feels! 

Magic carpets to carry us so far from this place where we are_Highspeed races and chases_

_ Drive bys taking place without use of a car! 

Her kiss is the bullet of deady surrender.

The sweetness of service she’s willing to render_greatest by far:

To enroute replace my pumping mechanism, without medical training_without even leaving the hint-of-a-scar!  

       A pipe dream_a pipe bomb_ a zen.

 Near endless composition, the art of story telling unleashed from my phone or my pen_   

In base thirst for a woman I’ve known in other lives. 

And desire to keep knowing forever_

         _If forever could just be again, and again.    

I am trained to fix a broken heart, my own excluded.

For the heart is a time bomb_ your emotions are fire ball bearings_

_Your wiring is now made faulty, 

your rational mind is at times misguided-deluded…

• “Vasili, please, I’m lying here counting on your story to ease, I want erotic adventure, daring or fun, no more talk of feelings or the latest bombastic-head-fuck-with-a-gun, I like alegory, the-cave-with-the-thieves? What’s the name of that story?! No more tales of the mechanical heart, right before bed,”

• “I’ll tell you my dreams about star crossed Chechen peasants instead”.

II.

How can I, live so many lives; But be without you so many nights?

     Cold sweats. And the ache of seperation, imprisonment and then exile:

 Broken bottles or spears or my pen’s wronging rights, 

Sweat itself often passes as tears. 

While Writing my politics off as mere hooligan fist fights?   

I didn’t mean to trouble you with me, But we seem unable to end it quickly,

     Or end me quietly.

I have been hunted like a partisan and I found refuge in your secret kisses.

      Now we are partisans together I suppose, but you warned me you prefer the cities to the forests. The Peoni to the Rose. 

     What about Peoni verses Prose?

I prefer bath houses to General Winter_and the wearing of my solitude below four layers of my clothes.

So how now? 

Where will we find shelter?

We’ve run helter-skelter on the glass-bottle-broken-beaches or that Bulgar tavern where we hide.

            They have done so many things to me, 

Until now I cannot recognize my own face. 

I listen it seems, but prefer to confide.

            But it is just the face of a man claiming love! 

Cupids arrows mutilate. 

The barrage burns apart my barricades like katusha rockets, raining from above. 

Don’t fail me fearless heart, 

Ill get back to you! 

From Shali, the mountains, Brighton or Grozny too!

With  black eyes, black ties, last tries; this is no mere seduction, or simple desire:

 It’s a visceral longing to woe.  

Putin has declared war! But foolishly I long for just peace on this front line fight_

_A lull in the violence allowing me to steal my way back to you_guided by moon and my tragic-parachute-knockaround-daggerman-incite.  

 The barricade-we-made was cobbled together with useless albiet pretty word; 

Damn all my gradiose promises,

The misuse and abuse of fables and myth that confuse what I see with that which you claim that you heard.

I am almost quite old.

         In old soul time. 

I bought what you sold. Dash my face against Dagestan’s rocks, break all my bones if in this life I am more coward_more villain than hero and bold…

“Silly Vasa,” she giggles, pulling her supple  body supine even closer to closeness of mine, “Your passions on fire when you press your fingers to prose,_I’m drawing a line_ press your fingers to hold, I want Ambulance Action Peoni ambush_No thorns of the Rose, and my grand design for the story this time is to hear about the dark in your soul, the black rabbit hole where your ambulance goes!”  

III.

 A Poet paramedic: warm body, heart now made stone cold. I have the will, I carried bodies in piles through Bed Stuy, 

Up moutains_we always will battle the Reaper uphill.

 I never cried then, I did not even wince, 

Every night I’m not dreaming of loving your company, kissing your lips_I’m flashing right back_senses under attack: to life tremmors we trembled_in the City of Port-au-Prince! 

We carried legions off to what passed as hospitals.

 I’ve had to watch ten thousand die, now all I want is to carry you away from the coast of Brooklyn, magic carpet fly.

Fly in the face of your husband, your secrets; 

The dance I do with my stories, in trains or in cabs, returning with you 

To the place that you lie. 

But I dance again from time to time.You bring it out of me.

“Why cry old soul?” She whispers.

“I saw things I wasn’t meant to see.”

“Women like me?”

“You’re a dangerous creature we both can agree.” 

She gives me fourth and fifth tries, the body dies, but the song of the heart is timeless, therefore free.

IV.

Because when you are gone there are only words. Words make the basis of poems_ forming a plee from the deepest depths of my heart’s agony.

When each parting seems so long my mind invents monsters which lurk which are not even there!

In a silky, billowing dress_ I’d hide under your covers, I’d caress the folds of your being, run fingers through darkness through the locks of your hair.

• “Until I’m safe too?”

• “Like my fallen angel with her wings on gold fire; Dorogaia I need you.”

I pace the Brighton Boardwalk so long that all these lives mesh together ’til the story seems too wild, too Noire to be true; 

• “Turn this cab toward the seaboard, turn Idlewild, let’s run away, before we break day_”

• “You haven’t a clue! Mad man! A poorly laid plan!” 

Begging for some proof of goodness of his kind.

• “The validity of his mind!” 

A million cold stones acquired over long tenuous adventures, but regrets are for traitors on rewind.

Battles and then conflicting accounts of my enemies treacheries abound. 

An escape plan is successful only when the underlying logic is found! 

The logic is half based on a whisper, and half on a dream. 

 Their scissor hands dripping from love of the kill. Demons enter the portal with intention to scheme. To make you a mark, turn me to a skell or a shill.

They separated me from my humanity, loving you is against my rational will.

She’s half in the old world, 

and half in the new, 

half iron curtain, half crystal glass shoe. 

The cab nears the Verazono precipice, the Brighton abyss where we will be seperated anew. 

Tell me Odysseus: What mean me to you?

Was that voyage anything but unjust for all involved? 

 Once I had a white motor cycle, I was a fugitive slave, I was evolved. I killed the master and stormed the plantation and then half of the problem was solved!

And on it you waited to escape north toward the blue moon. 

• “Sooner than soon? Did your love for me grow after the rooftop fist fight in the light of my murderous swoon?”

• “Dorogaia that’s right.”

• “I don’t want such a life; a life of no humor, a life or death struggle, the terror of night.”

• “Stories for night, are about all of the wrongs swept away by the dawn and the light. I require one muse only. One significant. One longing. Never again in the trenches so vast, so empty and so lonely.”

• “The story of us? Us is a wild tragic roundabout fuss!”

• “Is_to_be_a_tale_of_triumph. Over the hopeless heart via the art of romantic prolonging!”

• “Righting or wronging?” 

• “I sought out your company.” 

• “Do it again.” 

• “I do it still out of the longing.” 

I have a voice and I have a loud pen. 

And I have passion and it overflows my body until I see miracles in the streets. 

The strength of forty men!

And the moon winks. 

Then on Banner Ave. the story completes. 

And then again, the world’s smallest violin plays just for us, she thinks. 

                Why does such a long shadow fall over his house every time he drinks?

                We are not star crossed.

                We are not divided by a sea.

                Or by barricades. Maybe we’re just in defiance of destiny.

                Or the flaming up of the ghettos in the latest Caucasian raids.

                    When I looked to the sky I saw three ships sailing us apart.

                    You off to marriage and the world of the continent.

                Me, bound forever to the belly of the ship enslaved only to my own fearless heart.

                And as they sailed us apart, to never meet again,

Some sailors sang out, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!”

                “To the glory of the new world!” they toasted. 

Vain Braggarts and white men.

                    But I begged the moon: 

“Dasha, Dasha, Dasha! Why can’t you love a wild peasant like me?”

                What fate was this where we have to part our story time in endless tragedy?

            Death itself could not stop this kind of beating in my chest.

            If am reborn another thousand lives,

            Each time waking from a long kiss good night,

            Each life I will call out to you again as my test. 

The body will die, but its sleep is the cousin of rest. 

            So, tied again to the mast.

            Shackled and blinded I swagger on hopeless, fearless heart.

            In dreams, don’t forget me. 

This was begged long ago.

            I will steal away and climb to the roof of Mt. Olympus if I must to give the gods a show.

            I’ll ask for the help of the spirits if God has no time for us artisans.

Wild peasant partisans, from good families with magic carpets and reckless biwinning minds. The heart yearns, the back breaks, the soul is on fire, the real man, he grinds. 

Black until blue.

Carrying me, one day, with wings home to you.

            And if you read my verses see if I still appear a slave.

            And we can say we knew each other when I was a free man and you were a free woman. I’ve traded my weapons of war for the power to save.  

            There is only one chain I cannot learn easily how to break.

            And that, is the one I first broke to be by your side. By your side, give or take.

            I long for you.

            It will always be that way. It has been that way since Labor Day.

                But then, story time is easy for an old soul with a pen. 

• “You’re not like other men.”

• “Hopeless, Fearless Heart how long apart must I wait to stay gone?”  

• “Vasa, I don’t know, forever. Or Until Dawn.”