Ballad # 3: 

“An Escapade Across the Fall”

Involving a Russian Woman and Several Hand Grenades

Cultural Context: 

{In the Newyorkgrad fall times of the Gregorian year 2011 two mildly dangerous people, dangerous in their own ways; became for a time, star-crossed lovers that were briefly aligned (allowed?) to kiss and make up. In the cultural context of one, his card had trouble clearing expectations. Yet, in but in four dates, he could know that marriage was possible.}

While others were sleeping, I dream with you awake.

We walk.

These cobblestone-streets, below big dead glass towers, in late night-predawn, imbibe, intake!

What goes in the noose or the nose? You choose.

Past the hungry day dens of the money changers and their many harlots.

Near the Golgotha of the Jew-Crusader alliance.

Down near Vesey Street. Near old Zuccotti? Where but days before the barricades fell amid a mild defiance.

  This sprawling neon jungle blots out the sun.

It blots out the stars. G-ds, moons and hope. Have your fun on the run.

The show of you! The unseen scars. 

Nothing good ever shines through.

All the way we go again from Brighton to the Districts.

“That bright?”

The color of money is still always the color of woo.

I can pretend to walk tall too. 

In your tight yellow garish dress. Your fake smile, you play crazy all night. You do!

I was scally cap clad. A free for all. I was winding. I was bulletproof.

Your crazy big blue eyes opened fire on call, 

I’ll always remember what you did on that roof.

Your darting hungry look is aloof.

Cut the line. Steal the lightning. Like a dagger when you needed a sudden surgery.

A reminder I was a new attraction, a libelous lap lap leading to perjury.

But we are still alive. 

With a high level of possible use.

We went about the city in waking life- what we do at night reminds us of past times.

We are temporarily blinded by the flood lights of crazy, “Cut all the bullshit.”

All arrhythmic, ectopic the self serving rhymes.”

Blinded, you captured, captivated-compelled us to deeds that might make past operations seem like parlor tricks.

Past creations were to be scribbles. The world was created in lines of tar and feather and slave marriage on broom sticks.

To upcoming tomes, you’ll never bother to read.

Old brush strokes!

Gunshots now! From the hip to move my hips to your hips to your lips.

Now the shots are with the precision of Cupid coated round.

An Israeli sniper lost now found.

I am for you! Hear and I am aware! You are a quite quickly moving target astound.  

I want you to know a lot about me.

When others ask did you kiss me, did you hold me, you can say “I own him”.

Say, “He breathes in this city just for me.”

“He writes books for free.”

“He moves his limbs up mountains, for we!”

“He takes over trains, he battles monsters, he tempts the very wrath of the Jew G-d and the spirits to be with me, one more night after night hand to hand.“

You can tell them whatever you want, or our nothing. When they clear the coffin from the sand.

It’s just an affair after all I suppose.

You can tell yourself what I’m cut from will not be seen for one thousand years. Once you decide, the file will burn or the case will close.

“In the fall, in the fall with your ass up or back against the wall!”

Out by Steeplechase pier by the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn, Night after Night.

When the sun rose. We were found again alive.

Full of the fight!

We died in the bar mid-sip.

We died on the coffin train!

We died in the cholera ship!

We died in the free fall of the airplane.

But since you tasted my blood, you bit my finger hard that first night; wax on your back.

Dripped on your shoulders and lower back, dripped on my lion ring, dripped on our hands clasped together. 

Your chest, your hips, your rack!

Your hand pressed in wax to my own. If we really died it could be with such a smile now.

How many flights?

Forty fucking days and forty fucking nights.

If they take me again in a raid. 

It will cheat us both. 

Of the magic in this, 

The sheer darkness in this escapade. 

And the old hope I know you still feel. 

The old lives, they make me want it too bad.

If I die tonight or in the morning, for the real, 

What will be with a very small smile?

This is real, shit. Pure. 

This is Russia’s white gold shit.

But don’t cheat me out of an hour a day or a year, or some life of it.

I want a good life, but one also with fake blond crazy blue you.

A loveless life is not any life. Poems do not raise children, it’s true. 

Ambulances move faster than Bentleys relatively speaking.

Less fashion for force, a bed for the fuck is still a bed for the creaking.

He can give you credit!

I can show you a freedom, which came out too cheap.

Not freedom to move and buy. 

Freedom from service, a freedom you keep. 

Servicing loveless nights and boring nights and weird strange awful nights.

Nights where they choke her.

“I want better credit and also possibly later some freedom”, was the last thing she said. Love and or a patron. A pawn or a power broker.

Freedom with eyes wide open to the sky.

Whine mine turn green and yours go silver, don’t ask me why.

And I can show you a life where you will never be afraid again, afraid of a boring lack luster loveless ride.

I confide.

“I may ask you to burn a bridge soon. That you’ve built over 5 years, with one goal.

I will provide all the passion and the petrol.”

And if there were things you thought you needed on the other side; 

I know how to replace them with better things.

Nights are long and days are wide.

I can cook and I can clean and raise children. 

I can save lives, 

You have seen me move a mob with words.

I shoot straight when I have to, I own many sharp knives.

I do have the strength of forty men.

And I know how to actually love then love again!

To thrill you with my words 

And back them with actions, like I did with the Kurds.

My sometimes stiff kisses, my hundred thousand years without, nights of white satin and solid gold dice, old-world lover loves. I cry out!

“When you kissed me you killed me and you saved me.”

It was only fair.

You’d just a week before nearly killed us over one single cigarette.

Because you’re fearless like me? Or just reckless I dare.

If you were my partner we could take on any army with switchblades.

Back to back, hand to hand.

Or help move a nation to rise, or two.

Fight the future from the place that we stand. 

“I don’t need you tonight.” She said.

I replied, “When?”

“To do anything. Just watch my back from dagger men.”

“The dead will bury the dead.”

Whisper, “Good luck Droog!”

“Come back to me alive every day and I will climb up higher with you when we’re wed!”

I will cross sentry canyons under no moonlight.

I will elude the follow-follow men.

I will uncut the spies. 

I have a minion, I know my ten.

I will break enemy lines under the dark cover and even outsmart the loupe Garrou in you.

I will make it through the forest pine.

I will always, life by life gets back to you.

And you will in this manifest of energy want for nothing. 

A backbone flute can’t be played unless you know the way of my spine.

“And our children will be the children of heroes!”

I am an American!

I think in color. Not simply in ones and zeros.

But this is not an American film.

You are pure Russian, but kitchens are where I cook. 

Not make self-murder like my man Mayakovsky

Your man is temporarily, a lucky man.

He had five whole years to lie beside you.

“You think you can get him off me?”

“Pull the pinout and toss it,” she said, gravity will guide you.

He did your nails, your clothes, your school, and your credit score.

I had under forty days to taste your lips, and I might start a bad war.

Notice the full extent of mesmerization.

How now, how, when? When are we talking?

“Were you not such a poet. Not such a good lay, one might accuse you of stalking.”

Your eyes, fuck me again, your eyes again.

They made love to me before my body could react.

When you first looked at me in the dance hall.

Nothing after was intact.

I for the first time, knew sweet surrender.

The taste of wanting to wait.

And as we lay in the forest,

Below the double barrels of the blue moon,

I knew that if you escaped with me I could love you for the rest of my life.

And dissembling, and more lives to come, full total swoon.

I remembered that we’d done this before.

More in the rest of my lives, we reunited our fires, we are very old souls.

What’s it all good for?

We can be old souls forever if it pleases you.

This kind of transgression is far worse than a sin.

“What the fuck are you on?” She asks with a grin.

But in the real world, in the world of woman and man.

It is really just a new kind of Russian novel. 

The grenades were laid,

It was only a pretty good plan.

Killing men comes with the job.

“So if I will love you for free, you will never love me, you will not leave your man. And I will die with a barrel to the gob.”

“You need it?”

I will have to open my own black heart and let you try and read it.

Then this Majik will be defensible with reason before it implodes as you claim it will.

Love intangible. Black cards have no limits, a fuck is a fuck and kill is a kill.

It has to be based on fact.

Proof?

Remember the roof?

Give me no longer than November, I will plan our escape!

I am a man of my word. I can counterattack, I can parlay and react.

All a man has. 

“All a man really knows from a cave is how to kill, eat, or to rape!”

Or, he is the things that he does and the vouch people heard.

In the end promises all will be unkempt, fuck what you heard.

“Dare what you dare.”

In the end, this will all end quite badly.

In the end, it’s just deeds and your word.

An endless escapade is coming.

One I’d like to share.

“Poor bastard fellow. Sad that you love me so much as such love is predicated on care.”