Scene 4

 

 

Strong Island, oh how your beaches become more cared for and more picturesque, the farther from the dark masses we go! Unmitigated, crisp dunes of unsoiled sand.

I have been out of the hospital for just under a black two months. I have been trying to put my life back together, as elegantly as possible under these shall we say, conditions. There have been some real complications, I am pushing through them best I can. Keeping my body moving, though my soul has been sold and my heart cut out, and my grand beliefs, well they are gone.

I am having great trouble separating the fakeness of my idealistic inventions, my creative proclivities from the objective real. What is in fact really happening, has happened in the papers of record, and on Instagram too! My imaginations must be totally divorced from what did in fact occur. Her lips taste different from in a dream or when rendered in my latest technicolored naughty painting. I am still hurting. Perhaps I will hurt forever, over that one woman that makes all the others pale in comparison. I shall die trying to explain myself to strangers and confidants alike.  All of the time I am hurting, it’s not ever her fault. She is so flawless! She has never mislead me. Others perhaps she has destroyed or driven to madness, but I was like that when she met me in the wild days and cruel nights preceding the great revolt of 2012. Which happened? Or did it really happen? Perhaps it was all a bleak, hopeless dream.

 

You can’t make someone love you. You can try, but it will basically kill you, and maybe you don’t care. I don’t, didn’t. I won’t!

 

I now am wandering around like a listless zombie, a mechanical man with no heart and no soul and no sense of any purpose. None at all. Defeated, again. I mumble her name to the extinguished red moon crescent sliver, I warble in public, I tell mobs her name in grim poetical.

And worse, I am alone again. Which to a social creature like I, is a torture in itself. I have no more friends. Somewhere in what was once Brooklyn, well either there or in the Wild West Indies, or back in Mother Africa is my best friend Mikhai Dbrisk, the others are all dead or have completely denounced me.

Being alone with the kind of thoughts I think, it is really quite brutal. Goldy, who once told me I am the smartest man she has ever met, she said I must be so lonely. So unhappy all the time. She once asked if my face had lost the muscle memory for smiles.

Perhaps not quite literally or figuratively, politically or even of the life style of fight and nightery speaking “alone”; but alone then in the only way it matters to me, for after all that war and all that trouble. She is not with me, she is unimpressed with where I had spent my nights and years. She is unmoved by what I did or didn’t do in the war, in the Brooklyn nights, in Palestine and Haiti. She never cared and she never will, and it doesn’t make her love me more or less what I did in her name, to stay with her. It’s the past, she barely remembers any of it. The power of right right now, we are in the future and the fire on the mountain, well those were tiny print words.

 

I stand on the beach, with my aging parents and we are drinking indigently. All of us still standing.

 

I wear a white pin striped dinner jacket, white linen pants and a soft white multibutton Barcelona cotton hippy shirt, my brother had once given me. My dark brown hair is slicked back with some cheap grease, now made hard and I look Italian. Or so some say. But I haven’t eaten any fucking pasta in many years, Piezan.

The waves crash big before us, we sit in the white wood pavilion on Main Beach, East Hampton drinking these date rape Margaritas that no one had over the years bothered to tell my father tasted like real shit, and got you angry an drunk, and made you say and do stupid things when Basque white wine, or Prosecco could have kept it much classier.

There are these big red signs saying “DANGER! NO SWIMMING.” As well as some local cops and some lingering life guards, seated near and on a sand buggy. There are picnicking civilians everywhere, it’s just half after 5. The big waves are all that remained of Tropical Storm Germaine, that the media told us would completely ruin the Labor Day Weekend.            With or without the storm, the weekend was a total wash anyway.

What year was this again? What time was even ever now? 2016 I suppose, but who cares. Really whose calendar was important? Just keep showing up for work is all they asked. No one remembered the war years anyway, especially not these Hamptonites, these Citified citiots, these liberal plump Jews. What? Not even half patriots! What had even happened in the Middle East, what had happened in Haiti; it was just some vague sad day dream. Bloody really only for foreign brown faces you’d never meet. Though the papers say we are sheltering 12,000 Syrians, that’s good of us. What also of the ashes of the Brooklyn Soviet, trampled under the iron heel of our government? Had the Labor Day rising four years ago even occurred as I remembered it and wrote it down? What of all my dear dead friends? Where were they buried? The only things left to prove I had even been there, that it was even real! Had I even done those things in those deserts and ghettos and mountains; a paramedic card in my pocket, the edges singed from when I tried to burn it and Goldy had stopped once me. Also, burns on the bilat of both my hands, from when she couldn’t.

And I still do dream of Ms. Goldy, when I so still even dream. Nothing is left of my original vision. Nothing has survived the Great War. The Labor Day Uprising has been forgotten, all its principle leaders were lined up and shot. The Brooklyn Ghetto which we once called the Brooklyn Soviet, it is rubble. The development vultures are circling the ash piles and pilings and smoldered wrecks of our greatest hopes.

Avram Adon, my father the plump aging 75 year old dentist look very tired. And Barbara Josephina, my sorcerous mother she sips the poisonous confection and looks into the sea.

Talk now turns to medical school. We were notified by mail that while I was interned in the hospital camps, being corrected in thought, I had been accepted to St. George’s Medical school in Grenada. This would be a fine way to stay out of trouble and maybe secure my life, the parents thought. I did too. For I was tired, and no one; not the doctors, the parents, the lovers or the remaining comrades trusted my mind anymore. So smart, and so squandered.

All these pschofants that once drank my fine and ate my feasts and feted at my fetes, they smiled like clowns and listened to my speeches! Now where were any of them? Dbrisk is probably in hiding in Brooklyn, what’s left of the central ghetto. Andrew Lesce is renting a small apartment in the Isle of Man, he was not very involved in the rising at all. Erin is under house arrest in Queens, and the others are all gone.

 

I have no more tears left. Not even for my face. Why are so many of my closest dead and I am cursed to be alive! The hospital camps took me, when I came out it was all over.

 

The waves crash and explode their foam and rip back out to the sea. They still evidently cannot predict the weather in this futuristic future of smart phones and devices. Where the oligarch David Rockefeller just had his 7^th heart transplant.

My parents are talking about something, that I cannot even hear and I remember the terrible great tease of seeing Goldy again on the roof, three years after I lost track of her in the carnage and tumult of the revolution, well that was less than two months ago I found her, I remember us running into that Bulger Tavern and signing away our souls, and…no it wasn’t real. It was all just in some revolutionary soap opera I wrote mourning her. In the real world though, I ran into Ms. Goldy on the roof of Output night club, and I spent the last two months with her, traveling the three states without ever using our papers, and dancing and dining and reading her my novels, the memoirs about the war years and the poems I wrote in her name. And then, then she broke it all off again. For my sake, she claims.

“I cannot love you as you love me, nothing has changed…you are killing yourself again.”

“Well, I feel the ocean telling me to swim,” I say.

I disrobed my white finery down to my under garments. I told my father, “Tell her that I loved her.” “I won’t,” he replied into his drink. And then I took off running down the beach into the bluest blackest crashingest surf, hoping the mighty ocean would just carry me away, knowing I wouldn’t die this way, knowing that I would float back to the beach eventually. I just didn’t care about my body anymore, about anything really. She came back, and she was gone. I had thought I would never see her again, and then she came back! Perhaps just one week after I got out the camps! I never thought I’d see her again, that she’d marry a doctor or end up in a comfort camp, or die from too much partying.

 

I cannot make her love me, I cannot ever be good enough for her, and she stays with me only out of art and pity. She doesn’t even remember our tumultuous life together and apart during the revolt! She remembers only what suits her, and I am a broken man, that, well, razpizdai! I don’t give a fuck anymore. Into the sea.

And the black waters over take me, if there are shouts from the crowded beach I hear them not at all. Perhaps I will really die this time. In this world I have no special luck or powers. Perhaps I will leave my body and wake up in the mountains, wake up where I’m supposed to me, wake up and love myself again. Or die for nothing, as my parents watch helplessly from the beach.

Well anyway my mother knows how much training I have. Splash I go, and really, no one is coming in after me with how huge these waves are.

The black blue ocean enters my insides and rips me out to sea. Before I go unconscious after a three story wave breaks over me, I see her on the beach shaking her head. Judging me harshly for my wanton disregard. My utter selfishness! The rip tides suck me down and out into the brine.

Scene 3

 

My name, embattled comrade, is Valentina Stanovova. I have blond hair and a smug, blushing baby face. I proudly a daughter of Dmitrograd, which is now minus one. I am not an architect per say, but I possess a body of certificates vouching admirably for my acumen in engineering and my useful gifts in fine arts and technical drafting.

I have been solicited by the Ministry of Sustainable Development, newly retitled, of the Federation of Russia to advance aid and good will to the Americans, the Americans our allies under the bold leadership of President Donald Trump, which occurred in the 8^th day of November of the year 2016, a hotly contested affair. Well anyway, the Americans are our allies, again. How nice of everyone. I deeply enjoy travel, but am indifferent to airplanes.

Since they were so supportive and nurturing to us in the 1990’s President Putin wishes to extend to them every bit of generosity now that they have shall we say a premier we can look in the eyes as a man.

I am flying first class on Aeroflot 873 Moscow to JFK direct, a part of a delegation of experts from the Development Ministry taking part in, shall we say renovations of popular landmarks. President Putin has said in a recent speech that by 2025 Russian made boots will crunch the red desert of Mars! Imagine that? I don’t really, I don’t. I am an architect by training and I am more concerned with things erected here on this orb, this terrestrial. But fine news, not all were so behind the clever and bold President, but we always had faith. Scary the 1990’s, real bad times, I was just a girl. Half the women of Ukraine sold off into flesh service! The Poles given nuclear missiles! Think of that, the Poles! All this is a quiet race of thoughts inside me. Mtyblonde hair is tied up professionally, I am in a crisp, and womanly business blue suit from France. All is well. This is such an opportunity.

The public address asks if any physicians are on board. If they could identify themselves to the crew, none visibly do in the first class chamber. The air maids wear a bright orange, a blood orange almost red smock, a little hammer and sickle in a star can be found in their head cap. Still no doctors.

My work in New York is massive, completely up ladder, completely a new league. I have made my name in the Russian Federation at a comparatively young age thought the design of various sporting areas; such as that of the Falcons of Nizhny Novgorod, an ice hockey team. The papers say I am a savant, a real gem, a real Slavic gift to the world still only aged 28. The Falcon Stadium is the third largest in the Federation, its opening roof seals with vast mechanical levers almost like a rose curling its petals inward, were such petals 78 ton sliding plates of steel.

My work in New York, our work is not so pedestrian, or populist. It concerns renovations of two famous Amerikanski landmarks, and the erecting of a floating pleasure garden above the central park of the Isle of Mann.

Still no doctor, I hope nothing calamitous is a foot.

The sky help are stirring, they are so well trained to not show any alarm, and they bring a man from storage, for economical seating, he is dark and dashing and I must say he is well dressed too in Zara brand maybe, he is too young to be a doctor.

I am curious now, I see a heavy set Americansky clutching his chest. Just maybe seven rows back in the business class periphery. The dark man, I say he is dark because his hair is on the browner side of black, but he has negative energy too about him. I can tell these things. He is taking the man’s blood pressure with a true cuff, not the automated, he is looking self-assured, asking the man questions in Anglesey. His patient looks fifty pounds obese. Flushed and distraught, actually no one else is paying attention but me and the sky help.

The helpingly helper is Eastern European moving, but I do not think he is a Russian actually.

“You’re a doctor,” a stewardess asks the man in Russian, who is requesting the medical bag be brought out, asking for some pills of this or that.

“Sorry, I don’t speak Russian,” the man replies listening to something with a stethoscope.

“Sorry,” the stewardess replies, “Are you a doctor?”

“A paramedic,” the man replies, which is enough for now the crew thinks and no doctors or nurses appear to be identifying themselves.

“What’s wrong with him?” a stewardess asks, surprised the paramedic doesn’t speak any Russian.

“He is having chest pains.”

The stewardess thinks, a nation of morbidly obese man babies.

And soon though the medical bag is brought out, and the dark paramedic is giving the man some pills, but it is too late, the fat American he clutches his chest and moans, he is very much now having a full blown heart attack!

The man appears to die in front of us, I gasp internally. Everyone in first class tries to not stair, the American paramedic, I assume he is American any way speaking English when Russian would be more pleasant to all of our ears, he seems calm though in his head perhaps he is either annoyed, or indifferent over variables only he can know. Such as doing CPR on a plane which is many kilometers from the east coast, the seat before me says 3 hours at least.

“Blat,” the paramedic says, he checks a pulse there is no pulse. I see him unbuckle the heft dead man and say, “help me lower him to the floor,” and the stewardess does, and she re checks the pulse and begins CPR, as all Aeroflot attendants are trained in basic life support when hired.

I unbuckle myself and come over, “I’m Valentina, can I help you?” I say in stupid sounding English, not that my English is poorly, just I know that English in general sounds so stupid.

He looks up from within the medical bag, where he’s taken out a red box with a button contraption, the stewardess in still doing the CPR, I expect to be asked if I have any training, “Can you take over her CPR in about 90 seconds,” he says, “I’m Valera, people call me Val, it’s short for Valera,” he says as he open the box, and rips the mans button shirts, and he get these pads on the dead fat man, tells the stewardess to hold CPR, the box says in Russian, “Analyzing, Analyzing heart rhythm.”

“What did it say to do,” he asks the stewardess.

She continues CPR, and tells him that it said to do that. Everyone is watching now in the first class compartment.

Valera seems mostly calm, he’s looking in the drug bag, and he clearly can’t read anything on the labels. It’s all in Russian.

“Read me what these vials say,” he asks me.

“Epinephrine 1:1000.”

“Take over CPR from her Ms. Valentina,” he says and I try I mean I just push on the chest and imitate the stewardess.

“Push hard and fast, allow for full chest recoil,” he says he’s drawing up the epinephrine into a syringe.

“Huh,” I say.

“It’s just something they say in CPR videos in the USA, you’re doing a wonderful job dorogaia,” he says in Russian, and winks.

“Hold this please,” he tells the Stewardess, he hands her two syringes he’s filled with epinephrine and normal saline. She does.

“Stop CPR,” he says maybe two minutes late and the box says something about shock advised push to shock, he clears us away and pushes it and the dead fat body jumps a little, he checks a pulse, tells the stewardess to hand me the drugs and do more CPR.

He began an IV and then he pushed one vial of epinephrine into the man, and this all went on for what seemed like a very long time.

There was more CPR, and more trying to shock with no result, and more epinephrine, then there was no more epinephrine, and he even did some CPR since there were no longer medications of a useful nature in the drug box, and the machine would shock the man no more.

“What now comrade paramedic?” I ask him. He seems unalarmed.

“When we stop pushing on his chest he will be certainly dead, but I will tell you that he will not be alive when we land in New York, even if brought back he will not be alive in a meaningful way.”

“Well should we stop then,” the little stewardess asks, we are switching every two minutes between the paramedic Valera Valera, and two stewards of sky help and I.

“I will tell you that there is nowhere to land for nearly three hours, and this chest pushing will require more people than us four to sustain for three hours,” he says while doing CPR.

“Well could he come back?”

“There’s a 1-6% chance if the CPR is continuous, if we are met in JFK by paramedics and physicians that he could be resuscitated, but it is unlikely as he has not responded to good CPR for twenty minutes and six rounds of epi. Switch with me,” he says to me.

And I take over again. Three more hours, blat. What is an American life worth?

“Do you speak Farsi,” he asks the stewardess who looks vaguely Central Asian, maybe.

She looks confused and a little upset, and says, “Niet.”

“I speak Farsi,” says the second the piolet who has arrived to review what is happening, a handsome young man.

And then they speak in Farsi. I look at the stewardess and she shrugs, the CPR is still going on, the four of us all around this heft dead business man, the paramedic Valera Valera said that no one stops for ventilations in Arizona, Seattle, South Africa, Dublin or Boston so we just take his word and do continuous CPR.

I wonder what he’s telling the pilot in Farsi.

Scene 2

 

I call out for her still into the death of a black ghetto night.

I will tell you know now, most dear tovarish, a story of our times. For if in the past I have written you of things that were and things that also could be; of fanciful alternate lives; or perhaps of wars or magic beyond your range of site and passions beyond your range of feeling. I have now set pen to paper to put down the events of our common year 2016, 5777 in the year of my tribe the Ivory. Known in your argots and crude vernaculars as the calendar year of the Hebrew people, the loathsome Jews.

We found ourselves in that year in the City of New York, a city where no one I had grown up with could live anywhere near the center for a mass of aristocrats, entertainers, money handlers, robber barons and oligarchs had pushed us all into their service living in the districts that ring the rivers East and Hudson. And in that year I was surrounded as was my way with former and post-Soviet gangsters, with newly arrived immigrants, with various Muslims and mystics, with Caribbeans & subversives, with ambulance workers, with jazz musicians with those who live the life of night. The right composition of any good dancehall party.

And then, living most precariously in a string of south and central Brooklyn apartments, making the kind of small talks I’d made for years, small talks of very, very big things I was reminded of an Old Russian saying, the words of some bathhouse mystic; that:

 

‘If I saw the size of my blessing coming, I would understand the magnitude of the battle we must fight.’

Someone said that to me in the Winter preceding the Labor Day Rising.

And, for years I had been part of a little embattled Otriad, a small group of idealists and EMTs, of visionaries, malcontents and perhaps also some hard radicals, a group of paramedics and their sympathizers that had on an island off the Coast of Galilee, Rhode Island pledged their meager resources to building a resistance movement. A movement which we certainly did not begin and will not perhaps unlikely see the freedom and equality for which we have prepared to lay down our lives and accepted as our duty to act upon.

 

On Labor Day of 2012, we participated in failed and foolish uprising in the borough of Brooklyn and most of us were killed.

 

I told my brother Benny in a letter, ‘that I do not know if the resistance is now 40 or 4 million women and men. I have not spoken to my commanding officers since 2007. I do not know where Commander Solomon is, if she is even alive. I do not know where General Avinadav DeBuitléir is building his secret army in Mother Africa, if still alive.’ I told my expatiated brother, that ‘I took my orders from Tel Aviv in the fall of 2001 and have attempted to carry them out to the best of my human agency, despite so many setbacks and perilous dehumanizing conditions we all have faced.’

Shortly after publishing a manuscript about the events of the uprising and uprising, as I remembered them the secret police dragged me off the street, into an ambulance and I spent some five weeks in the camps. And then was released, as if nothing happened, but everything was different.

I then, broken and despondent I met a woman on the roof of a club that night, which changed everything. For this was the most important woman of my life. And I was to battle and die for her, over, and over and over again! Tragic hero made me! She was and is the bravest one. I play along. How now, this was to be the story of her future and my past.

ACT ONE:

The Brunette in Grapes

 

Prelude

 

 

Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

 

 

Hold your breath. Breath smoke in if you must, you have to push yourself man, and you have to see things, make connections where you’re not totally sure they exist. You have to count down, you have to blink. To squint, break your knuckles and bleed maybe, bleed in quiet. You have to try, dig in your stuff, you don’t see it.

Pity, you can’t. You don’t have any solidarity at all. You don’t even know you’re still a slave. The chornay do. The world reminds them every day.

I don’t know if you can picture it yet comrade, the big wink. I don’t know if your mind can see the uprising as it was, how it all it went down. In a heartbeat, all was in flames. Anyone with black skin just being shot down in the street like rapid feral dogs! It didn’t have to be, no it didn’t! We could have reached some settlement the liberal elders said, I fundamentally disagree.

Black lives certainly don’t matter to anyone at all.

Were you to observe the crumble of the high grounds, the moral roads into base animal rage, I think it was enough that one in eight of their men was in prison, I think it enough that one died a week it seemed, a week, a day, every 48 hours? Statistics are all make believe. I don’t think any whites thought the chornay human anyway, so it was a real surprise that they were organizable.

 

The signal was a song, it is impossible to plan an uprising without a good sound track, that’s an old Haitian saying, and the gun fire erupted from make shift big truck alliance barricades and over turned cars, piled by the Grand Army Plaza. And the human spear thrust north, the melee of thousands, supported by millions counted on by no less than five billion souls, take over Manhattan and burn it all down. Light it all on fire.

Make them pay!

It was probably not a very good day for those marauders in the front of the flying columns, those the NYPD emptied clip after clip into, as was expected, before being torn apart and beheaded by the mob. The crush and screams of feet pounding the parkway, the blare of the signal song, the gun fire on both sides, fire bombs bursting in air.

Perhaps as many as four hundred men and women too plus died in the fire fight to conquer only one square of the board, the Grand Army Plaza was on fire and the Garveryites were killing police officers with the Kalashnikovs the Russians sold them, well anyway the Jews who sold them spoke Russian, but that’s as misleading a term as chorney.

And that eruption, that mostly black eruption lept north supported by tens of thousands of masqueraders, there was gun fire all night. You could be sure they’d ban Jeuvert this time for real, what was it really all about this annual dry run, now the streets were wet with blood.

The uprising had been about grievances, but it wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the handful of modest reforms groups put out there on the wire. No, it was about hate and about rage and about decades of powerlessness, about the failure of non-violence and playing the game to advance. Well, anyway what really was there to write about?

Concentrated machine gun fire stopped the Negro rebel onslaught at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The corpses were piled high, no one learned anything in the popular press.

 

 

 

#That Night

Brunette in Grapes & Other Russian American War Stories

Written By Adler S Walt

Dedicated to Natalia Abashkina

 

Characters:

Valera Adonaev, a Chechen patriot, Dasha Andreavna, courtesan of Penza, Benny Adonaev, Spanish smuggler, Viktor Dragan, East German spy, Valentina Stanovova, a Russian architect, Salvatore Caminiti, Sicilian gladiator, Natalia Abashkina, expensive supermodel, Dmitry Khulushin Koch, a villain, Avinadav Debutelier, Commander of the Resistance in Israel, Polina Mazaleava, a singer in Nizhny Novgorod, Oleg the Bear, Ukrainian Israeli photographer, Maxim Oztap, a smooth operator, Rafael Contreras Lynch, Peruvian revolutionary, Lauren Ayers, an American! Liana Zavulonova, Bukharin Princess. Valera Arefyev, a mystic, Mickhai Dbrisk, Jamaican paramedic, Rachael Rambo, an attorney from Fort Laughtrerdale, Daviti Koreintelli, Georgian arms dealer, Philip Rybalnik, Ukrainian hooligan, Jefferson McIntyre of New Orleans & Guyana, Stacious McKenzie, Trinidadian Special Forces

Mr. Ersatz, a real fucking villain.

 

 

 

 

Prelude

 

 

Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

 

 

Sometimes, old friend, I cry from own weakness. I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it untrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!

 

And then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.

 

I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had to no council to turn to. But, I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too. I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well planned evil.

 

And the responsibilities that were impressed on me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, and organized demonstrations, built unions, operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long term prison, and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.

 

And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.

 

“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart ultimately sends him,” Daria once declared.

 

So, really as was explained to me then in 2011 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Dasha Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.

 

I have been imprisoned twenty times. My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic.  I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and also tortured. The deaths of Mcgaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden and violent and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good for anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.

 

I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others. Dasha mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I have not the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man and I am seduced sometimes by wanting more good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, no one asked you to struggle!!

 

Friends, they torture me once a year. They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away over and over and over again. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who know that we can win the war. I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.

 

I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I’m talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.

 

I’m thankful for the resistance. I’m thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. Thankful for Commander Reed in Mosul, Commander Bonhomme in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and Debutelier. I love my family and my wife, I hope this is the year we go pro.

 

She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the grey uniform I wear now.

 

I raise glass to the East, for there somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, “Long live the resistance, God protect the blood line of the prophets and the Mossiach and the Mahdi. God keep us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and lead astray.”

 

For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers. This is just a love song.

#10: Bread of the Future

And now_cast aside, I’m always hungry here.
For the bread of the future.
That is because my sugar was consumed.
Not my goodness or sweetness,
But like Haitian charcoal, an endless burning
Took me to pyre.
Meat is made cleaner now with salt.
A Hilal regime also comes with blessings.
I’m told.
Fortune cookies are more fun when dinner is pleasant.
Yours last said,
“I will take steps never to hurt you, by seeing you only when your dreams return.”
And mine said, “Run and hide boy.”
You cannot offer her the world and ten deliver just a handful of poems!
This is no feast for the night train to Moscow.
But, that’s not in me these days to deliver on command.
To run and hide is no option either.
I am a fighter even against hopeless odds.
Even when my face is newly broken.
“There is no hope,” she says.
“That heart I captured in oils was yours not mine.
You are saying things with words,
That are not backed up by work you put in me.
Your eyes and actions are mismatching all stated intention.”
Tak!
I always stay and fight when it’s something worth tears to fight for.
And I knew you would never hurt me of your own intention.
Selfish-intention non-withstanding.
Nothing, is more worth fighting for than to win a heart.
But not to capture it.
I seek to win your hard heart_
_Overcome resistance,
With longing and with promise of a future happy life.
A life without love is not a life_
And love is no parlor trick.
It is built on passion.
On contract and on persistent deeds.
I am not so broken that these tears are for you.
They are my water spilt for failings of the past.
I am a partisan.
We are allowed tears in front of our lovers.
So do not spit on my tears.
Say sometimes, “Adler I have missed you, and you must give me more Adler.”
Happy Adler can change the world for his woman’s smile
And her crazy eyes, azure eyes looing sky high.
And live a long life for a partisan.
All 88 years left.
Dasha, “When you say you can’t see me again soon,”
I say I will walk not run.
Patience in long lives must be able to overcome fate.
I am now wide open to arrows.
A plate is my armor.
Made only of tin, not steel.
So basically I’m bullet proof officially,
I must stop chasing you or you will quickly be able to have me done in.
You are the only thing that can hurt me.
And you are also the only person in a cold world who can set me on fire.
What do I do with my heart?
I do love you and you are in the arms of another.
So in the meantime know this:
Without knowing each other’s futures,
We do know something of our pasts.
We shall assume this is a Russian bed time story, not an American fairy tale.
I am now a serf.
And you the wife of a baron.
I am an ambulance aristocrat in exile and you can always call for me to come back as your friend or a lover or partner forever.
I think forever is like General Winter.
Not open to suggestion, only indomitable.
Baukunin and Kropotkin knew.
They knew love is like General Winter too.
It dominates a man,
Consumes him until he retreats or reaches safely to a lover’s heart.
I am less like Mayakovski and soon more like Walter Sebastian Adler.
Dasha have some hope.
Winter is not long here.
Please don’t forget me, and sometimes even call on me.
Have hope; it floats.
I swear to that.
I saw it once in an American cinema.
This is the country we now share.
Hopeless odds are just the way our cowboy minds take to a challenge.

#9: Our Job is the Great Train Robberies

On the surface I am a man who bleeds and has blue blood.
It gushes,
It stains,
It slit-throat dies my collar,
Whether blue (or) white:
Into a deep Red half past dead.
I suspect an inquisition will be launched.
After the blaze of glory that will cause these businessmen and bankers_
To attempt a separation of my body from my head.
Please hear me now, I vow.
I will not allow_ your misconceived appropriations of my conduct_
To pave a path of larger virtue_
Conscript a newer logic, and make up parables about my motives on the day they strike me dead.
For her flesh is worth every dollar that they spend,
It pales as well as blushes,
I aim to pull her from her squalor,

And get below the surface of defenses that form the basis of her cries.
My hands are rough, to match my constitution:
Only knocking faces with knuckles bring solution to generate a proper exit for this operation sketched out in its entirety,
In dark places in my head.
I been knocked upside my head before, but I can count my victories as in the end far less pyric than the scale of my defeats.
When you let me caress your face it is like a jack knife to a swan.
Zeus as a swan, and you as perfection and me as the knife.
I run through you.
Because you let me.
Begrudgingly.
Each night a promise of the last night.
I am addicted to you like a junkie.
Addicted to your eyes, to your moves_
The way that you steal.
All the attention in a room.
I’d like to rob a train with you.
We’d use loaded guns not the blanks with pistol whippings that we lob at late nights at each other.
I’d like to make our passions something of a grandiose spectacle.
Only bed room interactions need remain secret.
Our escapades will be the stuff of urban legend.
You’ll talk about me as a lover over until we are old and grey, I hope because we will make love and escapade and unrelenting fuckery until our hips give out to age.
But if that is not the way it goes down, cookie crumbling courtship,
I am certain we will never forget each other.
I’d prefer we do your robberies in your fatherland and retire in to the mother love o the Caribbean. I am certain you’ll grow accustomed to the Chornay eventually.
Somewhere in the Caucuses.
The setting occupied Ickeria!
If we get caught we will be tortured, and that as you know better than me wil be just the beginning.
If we get away with it, it will be a political act.
And you will probably be accused on face book of marrying a communist.
If they clip me I’ll heal myself.
If they catch me, I’ll just hold out for your rescue and hope they don’t cut my eyes out first. If they catch you.
Have mercy.
I’d take to the theatre, by storm.
A plane or four.
If they harmed even a hair inferno!
Dasha, I love you if the world lacks applause we must generate it.
To tears, to fears and via audacious candor.
If we robbed a train in Russia,
It would, or could be a victimless crime.
Because the oligarchs, the business men, they run those trains.
As long as no one died, we would be heroes,
So long as we dumped New Rubles in the ghettos of the Caucuses.
And performed the deed in style.
I know you love to watch me work a crowd.
Hands in the air for the people’s train robbery!
Like a Chechen Ned Kelly.
But obviously even a little more insane.
Remember when I got those hipsters to do nothing for years?
I bet with some irons they’d dance to tune_
Or storm back a ticket booth after a bar halled speech.
Or maybe just do nothing still because everyone is so well fed here.
Did I tell you lately how once I wished_
Well honestly hoped_
I just want to work under you and beside you.
On a Job.
All those boss qualities you’ve got.
I’d like to take more of your orders.
To compete with the material affections of other powerful men,
Well that is a game I will lose.
To run away with you to the forests of the Caribbean.
Live to see that old blue moon twice.
Now those are preferential odds.
Remember when you asked, asked me to drip_
Drip hot wax on the fingers that I shoot with?
And then on your back?
And it was like seduction with nowhere to go as the midnight clocks struck.
And you drip it now on my iron spine.
And I admit longing is a certain kind of torture too.
Irons like I used to run the run the Q Train job.
The Tel Aviv Plane job.
The last evening in Spain job.
My little girl loves to eat so I got to make sure my girl has enough to eat job!
Dasha!
‘Til my lights go out,
Those fires below my brow are turned silent,
In a blaze of more incoming fire;
This gun is for your hire!
It is to now be your gun only.
And whatever occurs;
I shoot just for you still.

#07: In My New York Cell

In my cell_ time doesn’t move the same.
You dwell mostly in the past.
Or some far off, seemingly hopeless future.
I try_
And dream of you.
But I cannot.
That is because torments weigh on me and keep me from visions of happier times.
Self-hate over whelms.
You learn to hate your best in a cell.
Too much time to spend of the past_
The future is just a glimmer through a key hole.
I whisper your name to the rats and roaches that are my witnesses. I extol your virtues to a homeless Lune who sought-solace-in-suicide_
Tried it twice and_ will try again upon his release.
Your name has more fulfillment than the rations or the recycled air.
Dasha Andreavna!
I say it aloud and it is like the hurricane outside is a product of our passions, a fitting cap stone to our separation
It bears down on the city and could render my captivity and chemical manacles, tear the whole goddamn place apart.
I fade in and out.
I try and count the kisses I’ve received from you in just the first five weeks of courtship.
They took me just three weeks from our first kiss.
If each kiss was a bullet or hand grenade used against our faceless oppressors
I’m sure I’d be here longer.
I am drunk still on those kisses.
Drunk on the past.
Intoxication is no good substitute for really feeling.
I desire you still.
All about you, every smile, every stolen moment we have left.
Free me from this place Dasha. I cannot be a
Man right now without you holding me upright.
I love you limitlessly.
I wish that I could open myself like a Siberian doll;
Open each part until understanding became possible or at least there might lie hidden a jewel to steal.
But I fear each layer comes with more questions and there is now jewel, only madness and a blood diamond.
Shines with a price.
Unbreakable but such toughness has heightened emotional cost.
Dasha Andreavna!
I am neither a phantasm or a ghoul
Not a demon or an angel either, nor some hybrid like you.
We are unique specimens. And the world has punished me for my loudness and perhaps rewarded you for our beauty only to punish you in other ways.
A lot of worth we are, with a lot of trouble.
I hope my poems survive me.
I hope you are wrong every night you say it is our last night. You’ve been wrong a very good number of times before.
Mostly only about that last.
My art is thriving under your casual supervision. I hope my life these days is a testament to your glory and not self-glory.
I cherish you;
I am a slave to what we might be.
Not what we are.
I would do many tragic things to prove myself a hero.
Again, and again.
I do not have to prove I am brave; only brave enough, well enough to fully love.
Love early, love often, and love with complexity building to completion.
And then you will forget your slavery and your grinding imprisonment.

#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.”

I.

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.”

By: WSA,
dedicated to DASM.