#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.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 