Act 2, Scene 9

It was nearly winter in the Wilderness of North America, but this time the machines had been running for so long that it was neither cold nor impassible, nor even vaguely uncomfortable. It was still leather Jacket season just a week before the Christ Mass. And Sebastian Adon, this time in his own body and grounded in reality was humming and strolling with his hands in the brown leather jacket he’d owned for fifteen years. It sowed as much.

Alkaline, the Jamaican philosopher says ‘Everything in life just takes time,’ and that was the song in his head and that song sustained him. It was the water to parched lips and limbs and it was the kiss before jumping out a plane into the black sky of night.

In Hebrew, ‘he’ means ‘she’ and ‘who’ means him. And right now though, for the first time in a while since he became a civilian again; he; was Sebastian Adon and wasn’t using any fake papers, faces or nationalities. And she was Valentina Stanovova, aloof and whimsical and strangely interested in checking up on him.

He hadn’t heard from her in four and some months.

After the scary episode of fourth dimensional travel, her accusations in the Air Bathhouse, the wearing of the German suit for the first time. He was shook up, and even deleted her social security number and cell phone too. He knew he was gonna get out gunned, out spent, out classed and quick too. She was so real and so powerful, he had not been near magic like that since, and well dare he even say.

Curiously the next time Valentina Stanavova popped into his life; it was via an email inviting him to go ice skating in the globally jeans and t shirt warm late December in Bryant Park; filled with those who skate fast and those who dash their booties hard on the ice for all to see. And Sebastian Adon remembered that he used to roller blade when he was young which could not be conceptually much different. He hoped.

 

It was only her smile and little hand clasping his that prevented him from becoming a casualty of the ice and hoypaloyik mobs flying by all around them. She was so patient, she let him take her hand and slow her down and they spun by, several times he almost toppled them both. This was nothing like sky diving, nothing like gun play, nothing like painting, nothing like giving public speeches, nothing like evasive driving, nothing like hard fucking; nothing at all like several of things he believed he was good for. This was so pleasant. And it wasn’t very cold at all, and he genuinely felt that Ms. Stanavova didn’t judge him. Didn’t have man expectations at all.

Around they went. He was happiest holding her hand though she pushed him to find balance on his own, as many women ultimately did. There seemed like hundreds of people watching them, pointing waiting for people to wipe out. He’d give them a run for their money.

I’ll tell you what the strangest part was. She couldn’t read his mind so she didn’t see him scanning the crowd for a suicide bomber to blow apart all these happy people. She didn’t hear him ask himself were they being watched, all the paranoia of all his other work.

She couldn’t hear him being crazy, basically. Because this was the temple mount, this was the top of the citadel. There weren’t gonna be any bombings here. This wasn’t a backwater colony on the edge of the empire, like say Tel Aviv. This was a hard an monitored place.

“You know” she says, “you can buy a pair of skates on Amazon, we can make a little habit out of all this,” and she smiles at him. And he breaks his mental train of thought about wondering what year it was.

“I should, I mean I like it,” he replies.

The skate on and then she heads to the center of the rink to practice her precision amid some little cones. He mostly watches. The war is so far away, it was maybe like; there was no war?

“I love skating so much, I love all winter sports; do you ski or snow board, maybe we can make a trip later on, when I come back.”

She was always coming or going this little architect. She was supposed to have been visiting family in Russia, but had ended up in Hong Kong. She was soon to be off for Brazil, but who knew it was all so effortless her various movements. She had changed her architecture firm about four times since they met, maybe that was normal. She was an artful dodger, filled with wanderlust like him, but perhaps with more means to act on it casually. She was either wealthy herself or had a patron, like everyone else in this city.

A massive airship was moving directly above the city New Jersey bound, these ‘floating fortresses’ were massive cold fusion powered leviathans. They could wipe out whole cities, they housed vast drone fleets and terra drone soldiers for mop ups. Actually no one could see it seemed, but him. He’d seen on brought down over Strong Island two years before in the Battle of Brooklyn Soviet.

“Stop day dreaming droog, look at me, look at my moves!” she says and executes a little spin twist, twirl.

“How now!” he smiles.

Was it real? The airship and the Battle of Brooklyn? Can his soul be loaded like a wetware microchip into a German businessman’s flesh suit? Was that real, did that happen? Did the map that he had seen in the bunker on avenue J indicate that the elevation of Manhattan, therefore the entirety of the Isle of Man citadel was actually almost 40,000 kilometers above sea level; therefore like a veritable mountain above the mostly flat Brooklyn Soviet? Was it disguised by hologram?

“You’re doing it again Sebastian,” she laughs, “you’re spacing away when you should be here with me. Are you having fun with me?”

“I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a year,” he says, which is true as this is very fun and you cannot line up tantric sex and ice skating, because they are not even the same category of fun. His last couple ex-girlfriends were not that ‘fun’.

“I’m happy too, this is great,” Valentina says and they return into the fray of clockwise movement, dashing, darting, moving fast and slow.

Had he ever been ice skating in this decade? No, he doubted it. This memory pops into his head suddenly; of the ice cracking, or shattering and his falling into a frozen lake and then, black.

“We could try more places too,” she says. She notices he’s taken her hand again even though maybe he doesn’t need to, she lets it go, and he is a sweetheart. A beautiful minded Amerikanski, so rare.

The Bryant Park rink closes and they’re sitting in his battered white Civic sipping tea.

There are these rules the Resistance codified called the ‘Security Culture’ it’s an understanding that you can be recorded almost anywhere, but cars, homes and public places are always recorded. Cell phone microphones are always on, even though most think it wipes out your battery quickly to real time record. Sending anything electronically is all recorded. Searching for anything unorthodox is flagged. Public libraries are all flagged. You basically can’t have a secure conversation except on a hike, with no phone, in a bathhouse, except the ones already wired up, you can have one by passing had written notes. Was he going to pass her the note that he wrote, not this time.

 

All smiles and tea, all free loving and also quick to block him out for months on end with no explanation other than she was busy, or a family emergency. What were they going to do with each other.

He offered to drive her home, and she said simply, “I’m not sleeping at my home tonight.” And that broke his heart a little that that was so overt.

Boyfriends and husbands never stopped him much before, but it was 2016 soon, it was time to have a higher opinion of oneself. He’s never even thought to try and kiss her, it just hadn’t been appropriate, and wasn’t now. They sipped more tea.

Waited to part company soon, the white bent up, economical Honda Civic faced East on 42^nd street, parked next to the Grand Library where he used to study medicine with Ariel Elmallay. Just several clicks ahead was the United Nations building whose big white tower could be hit by almost any errant rocket fired from the coast of Breuklyn Soviet, visually speaking but in reality to hit that tower would require Iranian fire power, not made in Brooklyn basements; because it was an illusion that the World Trade Center, the UN Building and Empire State building could be seen from places like Dumbo or Williamsburg; an illusion! Rockets couldn’t easily hit these edifices because they were high above, higher than third dimensional perception allowed. He knew that to be true, like he knows he is a lefty.

 

Maybe he’s drifting so far away because he knows there isn’t anyone to center him back, no one who cares to take the risk to do that work. Certainly not her.

 

“I wonder what you’re doing with me,” he says.

“I enjoy your mind a lot.”

“What if I didn’t want to see you again?”

“I would discourage that, we have fun don’t we. Don’t cheat me out of clean fun.”

“You make me feel marginal you know, you’re real busy. I for the very first time have too much time to know what to do with. But I don’t have anything to offer you, I have dirty job, a shitty car. No money.”

“You have a lot more than most. Your mind is exciting and I would never encourage you to not see me, but you need to respect my time and my; shall we say circumstances.”

“I think I will develop feelings for you and ruin the little magic you might feel.”

“Take whatever risk you must.”

“What am I good for?”

“Remains to be seen.”

“Do you remember the last time we were together?” he asks her.

“Live in the moment Sebastian, droog, wake up, this is all real. I go to Brazil in 5 days, there will be no time to see you before I go, it’s not personal. I’m working on a complex structure at work, something like was always talked of; a hanging garden above central park! Exciting right, as we always talked about.”

They had been on four or five or six dates, some were not really dates some were just sweet palavers, maybe they all were since she had a boyfriend or a husband or a patron or a keeper and they’d not even done more than barely hold hands on ice.

The second date he told her an idea of building a floating pleasure garden above central park and it stuck in her head and now she had done it; she had found the backers to erect such a thing and political will bought to uphold that plan.

“You’re so impressive,” he tells her.

As long as he’s known her he’s though so.

“Wonderful that you think so, I think so too, about us both.”

“Well what now?” he asks, “when again will I see you?

She hands him a little envelope and inside it is a picture of her looking blonde and ravishing shot by a professional photographer. There is a red lip stick kiss on it. Some numbers are written on the back. There’s a lot of reason to believe he shouldn’t call those numbers. But he will.

 

“I’m worth so much to so many, just go slowly,” she says.

“I don’t know when you’ll see me again, but I know you won’t forget me,” she says.

“You’re sweet,” he says.

“Don’t get a cavity,” she replies.

 

A great Rabbi once said ‘in love don’t ever come empty handed’, but he did. He didn’t have anything to give her before she left, just a letter he wrote in the glove compartment, but he wasn’t gonna open it now. It wasn’t even sentimental like her photo, although a few guys probably had that photo for Christmas, whoever she was going to Brazil with something better still. Maybe, but maybe that was all a story in his head. Maybe she was sweet. Honestly, who knew?

 

The things I might do, he thinks.

“The things you might do, is why I keep coming back to you,” she says.

“Can I take you on a real date after Brazil?”

“You can try.”

“I’m going to think about you a lot when you’re gone,” he says.

“Not too much,” she says, “just enough so a smile forms on your lips and then it passes. Not like your other girls, not like anything before. Think about me until it hurts, and stop there. Think about your future.”

“When you come back from Brazil, it will be the future.”

“That’s true. I must go, please know that I have never had any intention of hurting you.”

“Good bye, have fun in Brazil.”

“I will. Have fun wherever you are.”

And they kiss professionally on the cheek only one time, and she get out of the car and takes of briskly into the streets and the night.

 

And he is sure he will never see her again. But he’s thought that before. The Civic takes off down 42^nd street heading to the FDR where a bridge, an illusionary bridge between two words or a tunnel, a paid tunnel will take him back to the tiny Brooklyn safe house he is staying on Avenue J and Coney Island Ave. His body hurts, he’s uncomfortable in his own skin.

 

 

 

Chapter One

January 4^th, 2012

It has been two years since I first arrived in Port-Au-Prince. It is remarkable how short it feels, the eyes close just for a second and flashes of the dream on fire emerge in a slew of most visceral memories; as if they were the lips of a lover parted with just one moment before. Yelizaveta, how I miss her already; and if the last two years has erupted now in snap shots, bombastic escapades and grind; well in just eight hours I miss her as if it were a month, then a year, a forever passing in rapid cycle. Time is relative, memory subjective but for the past two years, really two human moments, there has really been only the desire to possess Yelizaveta juxtaposed with my total solidarity with the Haitians. The moral empathy, endless struggle to know them as a people so that I might wed my trade and toil and talent to the cause of their inevitable liberation.

The attainment of human rights long deferred and structurally denied.

I am now on a plane. It is Continental Flight 1647 and Victor Emile Cange, my stalwart comrade and partner in this operation slumbers silently, Christianly even. Next to me. We have succeeded in moving 840 kilograms of Basic Life Support medical equipment past U.S. customs and home land security. Long boards have become surf boards, bags loaded with stethoscopes, sphygmometers, training manuals, wound care supplies, are all just our non-declared tourist items. The second anniversary of the quake is eight days away, it is 4th January, 2012, by body is tried still from the ethanol athletics of New Years. Yelizaveta is still on my very lips, I can still feel where she grabbed the blue collar of my uniform and pulled me in.

Victor and I are wearing the unmarked blue battle dress uniform fatigues of the movement we are affiliated to; the Banshee underground, and the z.o.b. We suspect these uniforms will allow us more scrutiny going into country while lending less scrutiny to our bags. There is an embargo on all bulk items entering the country not coming in as declared and taxes humanitarian cargo until January 15^th.

Like most Blan initiatives pre/post-quake; the dynamics of doing any so-called good are maddening and inexplicable; and have many factions to blame themselves on. Principally always the tiny 5% of the Neg, Mulatto and Arab bourgeoisie, followed by the MINUSTAH UN authorities, the cartels, and the Republic of NGO technocrats. And also the heat, and also history and illiteracy, and famine and rampaging Nepalese Cholera too.

Once again, we are flying into a hell. Flying into the city of lost children and shattered dreams; the land of many mountains. Ayiti Cherie! We are the third wave of the reinforcements from New York. We will meet Tiputti Capois, our oldest associate and brother at Toussaint L’Ouvature International Airport. And re-supply the Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, the Haitian Emergency Group. We will meet their members and prepare them rigorously. EMT practical drills and negotiations on their future, and plans. We will ready them to stand before the archangel Michael Mastroianni who arrives 21^st January to administer a witnessed practical and written EMT exam. For whatever good it will do I pray we find them stalwart and reasonably well organized.

I pray too that the city isn’t exactly as I left it two years ago.

Around us on the plane are the faces of Haiti; noire, mulat, blan and representing all things. Things tragic, things ineffective, things self-serving, self-dealing, against and for human dignity, faces of perseverance, of calm of nervousness of taking and of giving. There is also the hard face of Haitian pride, indomitable.

So many trying with the mandate of science, God, and reason to remake the face of Haiti; save her somehow in some small way.

So many never even asked the Haitian people. Too many are simply short sighted interventionists. Or cowered by the ten million masses shackled in the modes of survival. Today we will ask the GAI and their members where to from here? Victor, myself, Michael, all of us in Banshee and LAHAF; all the supporters of the movement; all the veterans of the first and second waves; one and all are fighting for a small dream too.

But thankfully none have died for it, yet. I remember so many faces from the first time; from 15 January, 2010 to 28 January, 2010; the first wave. The Bed Stuy-AMHE Detachment. Our tumultuous landing in the 6^th day of relief, before the bodies were buried or the smoke had cleared. Indomitable will; fearlessness and selflessness and all of that faith we had in our humanity. The cooperative solidarity of a Kombit Medikal. That two weeks, that slaughter of so many Haitians; who knows whether it was 1, 2, 3,000,000 people; no one knows at all. That laid the basis of my dream, the dream I sold to Victor, to Cassidy, to Dominich, to Lou Auguste Jr and LAHAF, to Jenn Slitter, to all of the Banshee underground, well I’d sold the dream even to myself convincingly. We dreamed that the Haitians would have the training, will and organization to save lives.

I must always remember the steams of the bathhouse, where me and my first partner, my first co-conspirator beautiful Yelizaveta Kotlyarova gave me true support and true unflinching council. Must also keep my parents in mind, or in a heartbeat I would lose myself in the people of Haiti and never return to America at all. Go big or go home, banshee-motherfucka-if-ya-ain’t-running-with-it-run-from-it.

Victor knows this well.

We were both there in the blood and rubble of the trembling earth. Our tears and their lack of tears our blood and their blood, mixed into the casement and cracks on the pavement. I may have the face of a blan, but my heart is that of a Haitian. My constitution to take the struggle to where it must logically go, all the way up the great mountain, to secure this people, my adopted people from vicious exploitation, mismanaged sympathy, foreign rape and plunder. For two whole years we organized volunteers, we supplied the GAI with trainers and gear. And reinforced the shared dream. Not EMS in Haiti! Not mere ambulances! The power to respond to human and natural disaster on their own, the ability to rescue their own people. Liberty through control of their own social services, full human rights would come later, full reclamation of sovereignty. Realization of emancipation and the conclusion of the revolution. Haiti, finally in the hands of Haitian people.

How am I such now a major patriot for a foreign people? In their eyes I see my own people, maybe I see myself in another life. That is what the earthquake showed me about myself and my destiny. I see my reflection as a human in them. I see a way to reclaim my own humanity, restore my own life through something much more important than mere me.

And I have lost so much on this battle already, they think, some think I am a mad man possessed by the spirits. Which spirit I do not even bother to guess. Something had entered me in those grisly days of the first wave. I saw the world to come.

I saw that were I to show ineffable might, like a Haitian; I would live to see the liberation. I would live to see our victory over that oligarchy.

The Haitian oligarchy first and then the tyrants in my own nation and all of the other plantations too. For it was in this country, this was the beginning of the Great Revolt, it was the very first time a rebel alliance took on European hegemony, slavery and colonialism; and for a time won.

There was no only Yelizaveta and the slaughter I saw from the quake. Both opened my eyes to hating and to loving, to despair and to a possible freedom. With my eyes opened now they can never close until I am cold and dead. Haitian and foreigner, blan, mulat, neg; l’union fait la force! We are here to keeping laying a base.

The ability to heal and help is not the ability to save. Wounds and sickness across a body politico cannot be helped with small cosmetic Band-Aids. The blame for what happened here is a shared blame. There are so many people black and white and in between that have conspired to ruin Haiti. To keep her people backwards and maldeveloped as lesson to all those who would join the revolt.

Haiti hemorrhages now for 200 plus years and they kick her when she is down, they steal whatever there is to steal, they plunder and they rape and they abuse her while she lies long vanquished. 97% of the fucking trees are gone! 84% of the people live below $2 a day. No one even knows how many died in that quake because there was no census since 2004! When US marines kidnapped the first and only elected President Aristede and dragged him off to house arrest in the Central African Republic.

But Haitians will never be exterminated. Or long brought to their knees. They are capable of incredible resistance. Résistance to both foreign and domestic enemies. A year ago Jean Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc the last dictator) returned to a city of barricades and a populace demanding his arrest. Aristede returned to be celebrated though his party Lavalas is banned an illegal still. Resistance to and beyond death. In one generation or two in diaspora Haitians have become doctors, lawyers, nurses, lawyers and business men. More millionaires than any other Caribbean diaspora. They make up 1/5 of the Greater New York healthcare work force. Who knows if these statistics are true, they reflect a fact on the ground.

In Haiti, despite the best efforts of 10,800 non-governmental organizations (Klass ONG), charities and missionaries unleashed in the 1980’s after the fall of Duvalier in 1986; things have gotten as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. A UN garrison of roughly ten thousand Brazilian and Argentine soldiers occupies the only UN peacekeeping mission in a nation with no declared ceasefire between combatants; neo-Duvalierist oligarchs and the Famni Lavlas party.

Here everyone is dying.

Of cholera, of being a restovik child slave, of preventable disease, of Cholera, of road accidents, of child birth, or exposure and tropical storms, of hunger. Life expectancy is below 58. There are over 46,000 mostly white development technocrats here, they live well. On the top of the hills with servants and drivers. Parts of Kenscoff and Petionville look like high society France. With chipping paint. There is an opera house at the top of the mountain called Tara’s. You can see plays there or famous international musicians. There are so many Haiti’s except the one that most of its citizens live in; one of early death and great squalor.

If you are blind to that then you have not really been to this place. Or you are part to blame for it.

Many but few, have made Haiti what she is. The iron heel is elusive and complex. The violators are of all colors and creeds. NGO imperialists, human and drug traffickers, Dominican businessmen, the local oligarchy. But before we can know our enemies we must know our friends. Tiputti and his sister Tipudine Capois do not talk politics. They are not affiliated with Lavalas or any faction we are aware of.  They met us during the quake and have told our grand alliance; Alliance 01 that they will organize their people.

We began with 68 EMT trainees and I am told we now have only 25 or 26 that are ready to test out, a year later. The other possible 100 members of GAI dropped the course Paramedic Instructor Howard carried out for 6 months, but they hang around the club and see what will be offered. Their motives are as diverse as our own collection of idealisms, but they want jobs in the medical sector. They want to leave the island some. They have varying degrees of patriotism, none speak English except Tiputti and his sister Tipudine. Many were original responders like Tiputti Capois who met Victor and I two years ago during the first wave in “unit C” when we enlisted several hundred to secure the General Hospital. Many are new. Most of the serious opportunists are gone allegedly. The GAI has held out with no pay for nearly two years, we sent a scout Wilkinson Francois to assess them three months ago, he reported enthusiasm but virtually no command structure of program for the future. He reported 25-30 possible EMTs and 40-100 first aiders, Haitians despise making rosters and lists of names, so they don’t do it.

These 25 potential EMT trainees, and 100 some odd responders, their family and friends are what we are here to properly assess the operational capability of.

Are they young bold visionaries seeking change in Haiti? Or are they opportunists as so many warned. Do they want real change, or do they just want jobs and livelihood? Well only Wilkinson had asked. Paramedic Instructor Howard has disappeared. Wilkinson as a Haitian and speaker of Haitian Creole had reported to us that they were sincere. And also a bunch of disorganized civilians in their early 20’s.

His report was what got authorization for Victor and I to proceed with a third Wave.

All the experts and much of the diaspora had told our Alliance that EMS in Port Au Prince is simply impossible. They told us our volunteers would be kidnapped, our supplies stolen or killed. They told us Haitians don’t do anything without being paid. Thinly guarded racism, a lot of it.

Victor has faith. I have zeal. And Michael Mastroianni has a great deal of expertise and we all wish to see if two years of effort had a result. Hundreds of other members and volunteers are waiting for our unit to validate or invalidate a lot of sacrifice. They came from Atlanta, from New York, from Miami, from Las Vegas, from Seattle and Chicago; 104 in the first wave, 28 medical and communications volunteers in the second wave. Now, just 3 in the third. Civilian volunteers all, mostly EMS, fire, and communications backgrounds kept this going for two years. GAI survived without pay or resources cut off from LAHAF and BANSHEE in the states except phone calls and email, periodically. They and we are fighting to give the people here and abroad something to believe in.

Hope floats? Maybe.

Soon people will testify. Haske & Mapfre, Greenlee, Denby, Marriana, Fishman and Resnick who shot a lot of film and took a lot of pictures. Hundreds of hours of never gonna be seen footage. How this occurred was wrongly held faith in the power of the media. No film was ever made. Thomas later made a short one.

Victor and I are emergency medical professionals, I’m an EMT, and he’s a paramedic. We have to determine alongside paramedic Mastroianni; was this all for nothing or is the GAI real. Can GAI pass BLS exams, take multiple choice tests and pass? They never even had power points or text books. Can they complete the eight stations of basic life support practical skills, can they hold up as real EMTs? Are they school kids or potential heroes and avenger of their people? We have to testify in less than 20 days.

Testify about the birth of Haitian EMS, and if a clandestine Haitian human rights movement can grow from that or not. In an hour we land at Toussaint L’Ouvature.

This time I bet they stamp my passport.

Thank god this is all finally happening. Despite all the struggle and all of the loss and hardship I feel as though we are close to the edge as well as the tipping point too. Real change. I pray I will never forget Yelizaveta’s face, how could I? More I pray I never fail to separate FACT from EMOTION, as all too many do in Haiti coming from the outside. I must make sure I sleep more, a little more. We have a lot of work cut out for us. Making the GAI ready for Michael, the 22 January test, the 26 January Consortium on EMS in Haiti, a lot must be done in just 22 days.

If you ain’t running with it, run from it. That’s what my life coach Lil Wayne told Yelizaveta and that’s what she told me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetic Prelude:

[Ineffable Might] {88}

1!

I have to get through tonight.

Through mid-tredarious forward assaults on the best of my iron vest incites.

My failure of amorous insight I like best,

The hole in the hollow, the pump that replaced the very black heart you stole from my mostly tumultuous chest. Mm-hmhm.

The pretend of a sigh, I know not the reason the rest of us feast while beyond citadel gates the rest of them die.

You have no idea how I try, when each time, each slight, each break of a promise of long life to come presides over the wisp of a hum!

After a long kiss good night and each missing delight.

Is the price I pay, I repeat what I say’ I slip not a single bit eager away, since your departure, wrong or for right

Grim departure into Moscow’s deepest ring roaded abyss, the spire of citadels cracking the rims of the night.

Did I get the last part of this parable right, the cold comes so quick and pulls blankets across over and under, unearthly so deathly, so white?

Was the price that I paid for surviving the run and gun into 30 decay; the brak and bray of the fire fisted fight?

All just a lie, a lie upon lie; a fuck upon a fuck of hardly giving anything since your flight back to Moscow my mind run amuck!

Know the palm of my hand, from the width of my spite. And the nose to the palm and the fist to the fall and dashing and lashing the fuck of if it all,

Ineffable might!

The spittle the bleeding the taking the needing of need, the needing the worst kind of slashing and misreading, the cut of my guts and drop of the floor.

I can’t take one more bit of this shit; the wanting and needing and lusting and ego size feeding the lies that I tell in the dark in the blood in the spit.

I have written nothing of note in a fortnight, the sublime in a rhyme the taking and selling and trading of time. The wasting of me, taking all I had left of shadow of man with an blackness of soul, that hole in my chest and the tack of the toll.

The words that in hatch marks we chiseled on the tree of life, cut into the fabric of magic unknown. We cut with a knife a most frivolous thing; a tantric phallus with fairies, with cantankerous birds and bare breasted women based on the porno graphs as a young man I was shown!

Warbler please, I balter blather bother as I beg you on my knees, as my own skin is a second hand cloth that I have no mastery of, Daphne grazing swans as stabbing eyes.

The tower lies. The science of lord of the flies. And the words they use the fish gut stench of reasons for the uncouth means their ways implies.

Dear one, citizen scientists playing along using flashier cars well-oiled sport teams ongoing efforts to pretend that they’re strong;

Hyper Development just setting in the death of man in the forest somewhere is a trumpet cacophony playing along.

 

2!!

I have to get through tonight.

A black breaded bite.

A bit from a stripper pop cake, or the glare of cattle do ambulance lights!

Exploding the quiet of poorly spent plight. I am sure that even my audience will agree I pick a most precarious fight?

How did I find a woman like you? A painted face pixie/ glowing indomitable spirit. A triumph of happy delight.

For my pain is leviathan. Swallows me Jonas like whole, the whole of the real the epic created the lies and masks and the anted up toll.

The world to me is mountain.

A treacherous fort on a series of hills.

At time my heart stops for a minute or two and escape I go from the physical plane; a gust of grey smoke; above the knives of the killers

The laugh of the joke;

The spies and their lies; the whores and the pills; the dagger men banking on newly spent kills!

I escape.

With an ephemeral form; ineffable might.

I arrive in the future, a futuristical place; optimistically new: a futurist man remade in my vast powers of so endlessly loving the very most essence of you.

The sheer will of my love, you say what know me of love?

It’s in my vertebral wires, the pumps and valves below and above; a flame driven of ebbing and tidying; expending reason, self-abasing, or pleasing, it keeps sails on the good ship Adler aright;

The good ship takes flight:

With red balloon ballast; for the love of the goddess they’re calling a piece, I fly like a battalion of eagles, no goslings or geese! Get me out Shrakasa Waltham; take me back to your arms; take the thick of me deeply and thrust away all this pain give me back my beloved, give me back my release!

Release to your arms, then everything’s right; and out of the sickly black whiteness of my last winter’s long running night.

 

3!!!

How did I come to be in this place! In this night. Despite all my lastingly brazenly brokenous promises made; most find my goodness of motive in fuck or in fight.

I chose this. You’re right.

No Waltham, no you. That’s what I know. That steel hand on your chest is a pledge that I’d love and support you through it all.

No matter how far. Or the places apart that we go.

No matter the heights.

Unlimited loving, but lately my powers are limited few; alone in this grim Shrakasa camp; staring at screens, talking in circles. Dreaming of you. When i look in a mirror I see a masked man; hiding his weakness, his murderous features a terrible blight.

What know me now of love. Perhaps you were always right.

What questions are these?

My face has been dashed. I’ve had current, a beating or two, my face has been water board splashed. Bleedings and squeeze.

You hate when I beg and you hate worse when I bellow; but if I can pray prostrate to the thing I call god;

I can beg the swifter return of the woman I love on my knees.

 

4!!!!

 

Black Gates of Ringed Roads!!

Halve the Bad Lands in between! Moscow where is Moscow! I am blind and bleeding from the ghastly things I’ve read but also seen!

I’m going to cut my very timber eyes-hatchets out for falling fancy i have invalidated the thrusts of bulldog black intent.

Replicate in my countenance a bleaker predilection, vast pre tension boils over; guest workers four leaf clovers; borrowed money poorly spent.

Click boots on black tarmac prospects covered in haggardly snows, my own sound and both unquiet mind plays ballads to your kind;

To flaunt all trepid interpretations of my base medical vocations, back hand to brackish bankers, my boots will crunch his jaw and leave all these business men cocksure now cock less grind.

I will beat him palpy pale, I’ll kill your Thomas cop I’ll brutalize your vile builder Andre and stab his heart with dagger bursts rip apart his vicious tale. Thought you my poems pretty song?  I’m a most violent nemesis to any motherfucker who has done my woman epic wrong!

Moscow where is Moscow it’s a place inside my mind; it’s a fortress it’s a mountain citadel, it’s a place I am kept from my only love and therefore it becomes a hell.

The deadness spreads inside me.

And the poems end but not my own is rightly neigh. I hate the thought of poetry, I like the thought of killing; killing myself to slaughter out the oligarchs and all your laundry list of vile, brutish guys.

I hate now the face of me!

I could kill ten thousand Europeans

Burn out every sand of Europe’s soil

It’s just a place to rape and shit and pee.

What people want they go to see! I try and tell them what to think more of perfect you and less of violent raging me. And you underestimate the violence that was done to those by Europe done to you and done to me. Done to mine and done to yours, I have fallen and am in drowning in my tears of madness dash my face upon the floors;

You left me here for Moscow, I am thus a dog a broken wolf and breathing smoke.

Hanged men hang for forty days before thieves decimate the corpses for the secrets in their cloak.

What near a life by proxy we.

Three continents apart is our manufactured destiny.

And you so fearless, you so noble, you so perfect and so true. Were the only thing that held be from these bastards back, of fear for me and more for you!

The Moscow spires and the snow fall, the oldness and the thrill. The vastness of separation is a poem not a kill.

The winds howl out and call for layers, my words mean nothing but effigies of deed and love between our warring peoples might seem ineffable, indeed.

I see you in my all my happy dreams, your thrilling beauty juxtaposed with my potential coming might. But for now like tragic Mayakovsky and his Tatiyana;

I am red.

And you are white.

 

From Somewhere With Love

 

I walked until the boardwalk ended and toppled complacently into delirium tremens,

Take your salt pills!!

She fucked to barely feed herself;

On the top of the mount,

On the silk of the sheets of those lowest of lying, American hills,

Civilization, hyper development when man was the hunter, the broad was the target,

But also the spoiler of kills.

There’s blood in my eye,

You left me alone in the provinces, you cursed me for nothing, and left me to die.

I once told that girl what a forest wife was,

She heard forested whore, she gave me a black eye,

That’s what losing yourself in translation, too often does.

She teaches us our English you say;

She once knocked my face with the flat of her hand,

You can’t learn a language that way.

My people come from the soil and learned what they did because they couldn’t buy land her people don’t play. And men who are real men always pay,

You taught be pay then you taught me to pray,

If you didn’t know manly or womanly I bet you they’ll teach you, for the right price, savage surrender someday.

This one’s gone got away, I had begged her to stay;

She is a blond Slavic doll, take her layers off, wood pop and peel, and what is it you finally see;

After layers and layers of beauty and darkness and lies;

She’s just filled with some diamond, kept hidden from me.

Blacken my lungs are my therapy now;

Stoly my blood,

Bile my tongue;

You measure my worth in the swipes of my hand,

You’d marry mirages of money, when you’re old or you’re young.

If I put nice words in the linings of my casket,

I only prolong the latest Russian girl from dancing on my grave;

I thought myself brave,

I gave like a slave.

The difference is widened; by the lie of a life you again failed, were rejected to save.

The life that you built with a hatchet and pen,

She don’t love you no more, she don’t love the drama, and she don’t love the color, the nuance of you getting crazy over the chornay, again.

Black on black heart;

The life you offered- and gave,

Like the phantasms enchanted, enchained to the walls of a red neon lighted- post-Soviet cave.

The highway between New York and Boston is now overly eerie to me;

When we fucked once in the truck stop,

On the hood of the Civic, while truckers looked on;

She said ‘you never look like you’re looking at me’,

You’re wide eyes always look but they rarely do see;

That time I fucked up my life- like the time we spent in that forest, I’m handcuffed to you but you’re always still leaning on me.

Then until November now;

The Connecticut cops captured me blindly, they dragged me of the Lucky Star like a hooligan;

On the border of Mass, on Route 83;

Looks what they look like, we turned to the ugly alonehood of me.

She left me crying gently in Waltham weigh station, the next day I beat retreat.

“Real men don’t cry,”

All your men are beasts judged by the things that they did,

For the good life you think you just have to stay here and someone will buy.

Look at this country,

All of its wars,

You make small talk; that comes out like you think all my people;

Are gangsters and whores.

When we loaded our lives in a dream; when you made me cry and I made you scream.

Look at all of this trouble you’re constantly bringing on me!

Drama and madness, like the blat chubbies watch on the fat of TV.

We’ve jumped out of planes, I’ve spoken of carrots, of sticks and of rings.

We’ve acquired all manner of Asian made things.

From somewhere with love, I’ve found little, no place with a pulse, if I were a man that could make myself into glorious flame,

I beg for the end of this winter,

I beg for the cultural warfare to end,

The end of my mind is but only a round of her game.

 

 

 

# 50: Havana Road

 

We could be in Havana by nightfall.

It’s what I’ve been whispering for years.

If I could just trade a pound of my flesh for just one single ounce of your tears.

 

Bloody paw marks cross my face! Self-inflicted.

Lash marked loved one; I am so careless for you.

Dug my own American grave in a record time, the scary parts of our company is that most of our stories are true. Avail me of your sling shot eyes, Last cartridge spent.

Temptation looks like you.

But, sin-not-simple-sinner!

Your thighs delight the treachery of lawless temperament.

Losing bearings righting wrongness.

Leather boots, And dark sun glasses, Skinny dipping long legged mikvah, digress under stress! What you wear under that dress is tougher than my mechanical heart or the flash of iron eyes scaling walls and the ripping off of clothing,

As the best dreams fall apart.

Over last supper, Our unsung broken heroes if the story’s told right can make all the martyrs grin.

Losing ones lost morals doesn’t make the skin itself once broken any thinner. Or the self inflicted violence of total recollection even a mostly piratic win. Temptation looks like you! How do you say exsanguination in Cyrillic?

I have not three fucks of clue.

I am too brazen for these bonds, As Benjamin bondage holds plantation risings, pale of settlement, comfort keeps the ghetto wall in check,

A noose about my neck!

The only true reminder, as I quiver amorous beside her,

What just one night loose in Babylon can make a brother do! And all this special for you, I pause to dot a check list, of what calamity ill next ensue.

For that’s just the market price to play, with a deadly creature such as you.

Some French-Reggaetone anthem belted out from the bodega,

As some abstracted grindhouse of a poem,

Or foreign tongued gift made of song.

And black death inside us, from those fires we long left burning, another late night in Brueklyn Soviet,

And we lied when we said that we knew our right from wrong.

I tell her, “We all just pretend that we’re strong.”

Like a tribute to golden aged exile. Or an ode to a bold deportee. She says that my goodness is good for her only half of the time. “But bless you you’re savage when beaten but always loving when looking at me.”

You’re drunk off your tired you’re constantly trying, you’re doing god’s work, so they claim. Just make sure that the salt it stays in the mind and not in the wounds as it distorts all the forces of blame.

What a spree! We did some violent pen to pad scribbling’s by cell phone at midnight.

Lately for her, and the glorious plot!

Plotting out plan dalet through z.

We all hope this violence you do to yourselves, is making a man out of me. The trouble with the nightlife in Brooklyn, Is that sinning comes mostly for free. When a thousand sweet words are the only way left_

_This city of Zion in a world of struggle has been bleeding the shit out me!

There is no lonelier place than the boardwalk at midnight. When your love lies in another man’s arms, And the ghosts and the screams from a life you had lived twice before_ are never completely drowned out by these danger filled banshee siren alarms!

Jessica asked what’s been killing me lately?

The Malboroman he has blackened my lungs and the Vodka has clouded the morals you so often condemn.

And I sold both my two souls and cut my own heart for the Russians just to try and see the world like them!

Madman, I hope she cries for you. As much as you secretly cry for yourself. As you dash your ambitious wilding dreaming,

On dagger ragged rocks of mislaid plans seen on Steeplechase pier.

Lover, lately I have no inclination for fear. Salt tastes like salt. If there’s blood on the streets you can bet a green dollar that god gives not a single shit, And always there’s a human to fault.

I’ve been a boxing a brickwall most lately.

And we all know the wall always wins.

When the lights went out you will be left alone with your failures, your torments and sin.

And a candle, will be the only way you better know the devils in your casement mirror. Death winks at you from the dirty mirror. And she calls for as you lie helpless and still unable to really hear her.

We’d could in Havana by nightfall.

It’s what I’ve been howling for years.

I’d easily trade a pound of my flesh for a single ounce of your tears.

 

 

 

#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.”

 

 

 

 

 

“

#038

 

 

Moscow Hostage Crisis

 

Part One

 

 

 

Life of the slave show!

I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.

 

And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down,

She always calls the shots,

Gun shots to blood soaked makeshift cots.

The shots she calls are complicated.

She must find me highly dedicated.

She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots.

 

The rules are anything goes, but no know one “knows”.

If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my over coat,

I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.

 

I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will;

To activate the full facilities,

Of word play, and use of allegory_

To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_

A Former Soviet love story.

Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.

It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.

It’s based upon real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_

Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need.

Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed.

Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,

She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight.

But I have a last name that is easy to place,

I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.

They can spot us on site!

It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead:

A tragic_ unyielding life of night.

We’ll sell a sordid tale.

I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_

Before she had to do what she did,

And does what she still do,

To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty.

My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_

To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.

I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron plated under shirts.

I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man, or a series of men, hit them in their pockets,

Hit them where it hurts.

 

I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place,

She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet,

And her mother fixed me midnight supper.

Herring, beets, Palemni.

And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.

 

(Small talk)

“And the snow fall is phenomenal this year”_

She retorts”

“Don’t get French with me my dear.”

_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.

(She loves the way I make the Ameikanski noire lingo mix out elequently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)

The pay phone call cannot be traced_

The weapons hidden in the drywall_

In the space your men replaced_

The ice cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_

Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.

They beat me for a fortnight,

Demand I sign a grim confession,

Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.

 

“Why can’t you be like normal men?”

 

I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)

 

And she says;

 

“I cannot love you if you’re dead.”

 

Please put the house in order,

Use the lithium,

Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary,

To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.

I’m not saying that I love you now or later,

Simply I refuse to cater_

To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_

Explain how you plan to court me_

From a black-bag-disappearance.

In frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.

If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation,

Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity,

In this bleak and foreign city_

Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_

Fuck it man! You’re doing it again!

 

I sigh and then reply:

 

“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaia and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”

 

Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours.

To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.

She isn’t one for single serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.

Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_

“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_

The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_

From the people who are dressed like you_

And carry paper work like me.”

 

I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_

Can entrap these men of business with their whoring,

With their thirst for further treasure_

With long lines of china white running from the mouse trap to their nose.

How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_

I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_

Blonde dynamite distractions_

Before any know exactly what’s in store.

Reduce the need for automatic weapons,

Acquire us the proper routes and channels_

And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.

 

She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”

I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._

 

 

Where we met is unimportant.

Did I mean to enlist her?

I couldn’t resist her.

I had causes and struggle and vengeance and plan.

I shouldn’t have kissed her

And longed for her touch,

For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.

We have become a most curious spectacle_lately.

You hate me? Push further,

Took you home from the bar stool,

Bite me_

Kick me_

Bait me.

She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:

I looked at her once.

And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead.

The wheel was her cold rationale,

The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.

And there were bright lights, that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.

Separating what she does_

From that which she’s still willing feel.

 

“You take up so much clock!

Blood from a rock!

I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.

And the steel trap will slam shut_

And bind me behind those District walls.

And the men of that vile district,

Will use their credit cards_

To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”

 

She said “root for me.”

I’m going voodoo out tonight_

To earn my money the City.

If you truly are my friend,

Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)

 

I am looking down the barrel at my pin striped enemy.

And the columns we’ve been shaking

And lives we’re always taking,

I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet.

You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes don’t you?

Are you blind to their transgressions?

A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.

 

Everything from here out, it’s true,

My bones rust, from your star dust, your fairy eyes_

I loose myself to you.

 

She says, “Oh the things you might do,”

Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.

 

If we want it bad enough we can get it:

“For the rest of our lives_

_we do.”

 

Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another a day or two.

 

Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia,

Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange,

For what they do to your body and mind,

And what they did to my family,

Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.

 

You’re crazy she said,

You’re crazy won’t get me dead.

Well talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.

It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know.

Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.

#012: Muse of the Brighton Bathhouse  

 

 

 

I interrogated you with Newport cigarettes pursed at my lips.

And you sized me up like a slave on the market block.

 

Emergently my covered wagon has been jettisoned and set ablaze by a blonde haired savage, a mercenary in clad multicolored finery with war paint under both blue eyes.

 

Brandishing a spear and also a bottle of Russian Standard.

 

She’s since infused my life with her Red Bull risings and cynical parables on the subject of snow ball fighting with General Winter.

 

“Drink!” she whispers out her demands.

 

Until in naked oblivion you can pronounce my name in full glory!

Take in all its parts and thus know my demons and also my saints.

Extoll me as your eternal choicest muse. Make me your goddess and savior, secretly.”

 

And thus I went to work.

 

My pen and pipes, belting out prose, parable and promises to fight for her to the death.

 

And she beat me half to tears with the venyike.

 

In a wild Peony Ambush,

She put herself upon me,

Robbed me bandit blind.

Of my heart, and second soul as I made art to celebrate the coming of she into me.

 

Penniless as a proverb.

 

I marshaled all remaining vagabond tendencies into the rigorous use of my baller ball point pen.

 

Woman, you are a golden locked lioness. Boxing with me, you strike incite and nerves unnerving furious fascination.

Womb to tomb!

You Caspian blue terrorist!

Thing of profoundest beauty.

Drag me down the Brighton Boardwalk and set me as an effigy of hopeless romanticism on the sand of Sea Gate!

Sky high on fire.

Take me to pyre.

 

When our correspondence first began in September it was like a report on a Cherokee Indian massacre.

Communicated via the passing of notes.

We conducted then a lively human traffic in roses and poems and also in promises.

 

A triangle trade.

 

You dripped wax on me shortly after.

I wrote you a play.

“I will try to believe any stories I tell you and you will make me immortal!”

In words and in dreams.

Pull!

I produced on demand and she shot each product down.

Exploding clay pigeons with poems tied to paw, and smoke signals playing out on the prairie skies, steppes and later the chalk marks made on the promenade off Banner Ave were the guarded displays of my awe.

 

More fire!

She proclaimed, by not proclaiming.

 

You tied me to a post and blind folded me so that in a mirror I’d not see my manly limitations, my grinning devils leering.

 

I, the artist would then yell fire!

 

And poems would be fired off, absconding into night with you as their target, their words would roll out the barrel of my wit without even seeking to dress themselves in the fine garments of rhyme.

 

The essential quality of a muse is that she will be perfect.

 

While at the same time being deeply flawed.

 

At times she will desire to taste you and be fueled on your fluids, intoxicate herself on your writhing talents taking the form of depiction and futurist words.

She is thrilled to test my will, taking me into the shadows of some late night smoke inundated poorly lit alley way.

Kissing me to tears under gas lit wind swept boulevards.

At other times, she teases out my rough savant best by ignoring me completely.

Make me create in some wilderness cave like a mad Hebrew prophet,

In some Warsaw ghetto tenement, create brave new worlds, burn apart in the steams of the bath house old dead tragic pasts until the proper 13th hour when she calculates just when I will be ready to perform.

Then dripping I emerge!

The greatest show; the highest form of art is after all the private performance you give her,

While these are not immortal, their audience of one is the source, the very foundation and subject of all the war effort !

 

The muse is not there to please you.

 

She is there to drag you uphill, in an assault on the profane glory of false gods and the smallness of men who plot in listless towers.

Oh yes. Only an artist can challenge the gods and the shackles of mortality they put upon us.

 

The essential quality of the artist is that he, or she, will possess some skill and some embattled implements that when rendering her muse perfections, and converting her human flaws into deeply troubling, yet inspiring cautionary apropos that;

This bipole, this anomaly of the creative process will then allow the artist the widest canvas to cast her into the form of goddess, a celestial being, a savior, a seductress, or an angel.

 

The artist regardless of his weaponry will be fighting his way up Bunker Hill.

 

When he gets there he will declare:

 

“Love me until your love overwhelms the white gates of heaven.  Ravish me blind until I only see myself in the blue ocean of your eyes!”

 

Her greatest strength as a subject is her ability to assume the form of desire but also to unleash a savage and indiscriminate rejection of the artist unless each piece produced is an improvement on her immortalization.

 

For were the muse to be a submissive Siberian doll, an inanimate beauty, well that is just an act of painterly masturbation.

 

Useless to me.

Please excuse for,

My Muse Makes Art a Contact Sport!

And in the steams of the banya I assume the form of Krepki Mushik,

Strong men making fearless art.

She’s a most capable gypsy partisan.

A hooligan seductress.

A wild eyed savage, she holds herself up as a virtuous courtesan, lady at heart, source of great and the granddaughter of Jewish Baroness.

Under her folds I do utter when the steams clear and no one occupies the coffin ship but we:

 

I’ll Lick your tits and drink Borjomi.

And then compose a body of American poems that will put all previous to shame.