We Are Witnessing the Greatest Russian Tragedy. Now.

Some twenty-seven million Soviets,

twenty-seven million of the beautiful people

fell as sealed and scattered seeds to earth

in the Great Patriotic War with the Beast.

Those were born as one-time Phoenixes

to the timber made of souls, strings, hearts

in the “Orthodox” melodies and songs

I can hear still Orphic romances and dirges,

some of the world’s deepest harmonies

by which the cosmos wanted to array

mankind’s stream and strife and hopes.

 

Oh, what then about the beautiful and its very soul?

How did that vanish so soon—after winning

at such a price and sacrifice the greatest of all wars?

Oh, do or ever did such heroic and beautiful souls

have a place where these were mocked and even denied

in the doctrine that cast the human as a concrete cadre,

as a soulless bloc made to suit a petite bureaucratic mind

for which all was matter, discipline, and iron order only?

What did a Khrushchev or a Brezhnev know or care

about things of the spirit, the soul and the beautiful

or about how gone heroes live or die, if uncared, upon their fall?

 

And how a lot more less is there left for a beauty and grace of souls

when everyone who wasn’t sold or bought knows that Putin’s bros

and Putin himself are the country’s and the nation’s assassins

and when the latter himself boasts that, under him, Russia is the first

now in the world for having “absolutely the best prostitutes of all,”

if not in the absolute numbers of ex-KGB oligarch-billionaires

made of the planned destitution and degradation of the nation

and of Russia’s plotted, plodding, cashed-in liquidation

under Vlasov’s flags unfurled amid Nazi wartime ranks?

Where can society’s depraved bottom once with total power

lead the country and the state if not to a hole that ends in Hell?

A Bohemian Song of an Old Ohioan Crabapple

 

On the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley woods,

as it is quite common at this time and place,

an old crabapple snows out with its bloom

like a mind that is back—in its one own moment,

 

giving—giving out once more a whiff, a scent,

signs of some ancient, pure, ever recurring dream

that could letter once more a song, a sigh, a poem

that too could have—would have broken free.

 

Oh, do we too bear ourselves within some such light,

stored restoring beauties’ prints, wrapped in white

& meant to come out only in wonder of brief whiles

to be seen, heeded, seized when a mind and a Muse

 

bridge once more their fatal gap and brush and graze

and taste and stroke one another, and if not—

then something great, too great to be named

would have to wither, die, pass, or go—

 

like an echo, like a shade cast off from its source,

like blossom barred from its animating light

or a soul locked once more in a voiceless night,

once more missed, unseen, unsung, unsent, unhealed—

Socrates! Which Ancient Trade Do You Practice in This Town?

What healing do they put on

with their high heels that eel

their way through the town

owned only by the poets

 

who, they say, might

be safely dead by now

or haven’t been born yet?

Public safety prose

 

of the late market society

with so much ordnance

always ready to explode

does mind a declaration

 

of any verse or line

or any migrant soul

not injected or infected

with a decent penchant

 

to sell one’s disease, drug,

dying or life or oneself

or anyone else for

that matter and to buy

 

in turn one’s own

officially approved

temporary way—

(non)being on this earth.

 

In number they believe.

In numbers ever growing.

For number is with God.

Even though nearly any dog

 

or a random bitch, always

a bit of the Athenian Cynic,

can easily be convicted

of having a heart much bigger

 

than such a God or number

with their dead or unseen hand,

as invisible as their heart.

And yet—it is good to be

 

one on one with that other

beauty that wouldn’t trade you

and that wouldn’t even sell,

for love like the soul

 

either is or isn’t.

And so with one another

you are getting drunk

and when she puts you

 

on herself as a rhythm

or as a rhyming line,

she does it with a smile

and grace that, on the outside,

 

could pass as a public offense

to all God’s good old despots

and their pious slaves and concubines,

while her beauty untaxed fills this cup.

How Did Plutonia Become Putinia?

 

Tarta-rus, the legendary land,

residence of dark and cold,

domicile of fog and gloom,

 

there they say souls go to

for an endless fill in their cups

by dreary death and doom

 

and are allowed streaming in

by heartless sentinels in doors

but only as a hollow shade.

 

That’s how the Greeks dreamt

of the after-world and the Scythians,

of the boundless, vast expanse

 

where the ilk of Taras Bulba roams.

There all the sense and human joy

have been drained like blood

 

poured down on the greedy ground

or on Satan’s ice, Hell’s freezing loins.

There nothing is redeemed, and all is lost.

 

There pitiless and callous death feeds

like a cruel, incensed beast on its own

and binds its captives to despair void of hope.

 

For a fleeting moment only, it is claimed,

some death, fresh new blood, or sacrifice,

would let a modicum of life be mimed

 

with a pretense that makes the devils laugh.

There death itself is a giant gastral pit

unto which some grotesque, morbid whim

 

had sown a behemoth’s gorging, gaping mouth.

Even God, the Gods of good old culture, swear

they hate and skirt this uncanny and creepy habitat,

 

and if any of them should go down and show up there,

then only like a bitch or some deformed slimy slither.

The denizens forgot there to be kind and how to care

 

unless the fools choose to choose the same jester

to be their deathless czar in their Tartaristan

and whore and pimp up their nasty, brutish ride.

 

There what humans used to be is thurified

and kept as playthings in Hades’ private pan.

That’s how Putin is putting Mother Russia down.