By Aleksey Calvin

Of course it begins in the middle of the end…

They strove to break a tyranny and all its symbols

Down to some form of unrequited love.

They were a fertile crop, Born to a sick empire,

On the ashes of massive massacres broken out of subdued desires.

And raised by nervous parents in a fate-less world, saved by a thread,

They were cherished, spoiled, emboldened:  never hungry, never cold.

As children of the moment, they forged disgust for an eternal mind,

And never having to survive, they mocked survivors’ stubborn pride…

 ——————————————————————————————–

With a real distrust of machinery’s killing floors, a fool’s lost gamble

They denied history as nothing if not a nightmare,

But instead of it saw amazing visions, bloodless revolutions, quests against the grain,

Half-remembered myths of unborn stars guiding each and all to epic fates.

 And they sharpened these visions like knives under their college cassocks.

They were Inheritors of ravaged ivory kingdoms stuffed with old filth and bones:

Oil-blooded machine wastelands throned by former heroes

Maddened by the power to destroy worlds,

Deadened by Kali as the seductive mistress…

And the children found it all disgusting, wanting everything, and best of all:

To live.

——————————————————————————-

So they rattled bones to a big beat, their dance-spaces melted all philosophy into Frenzy,

 And in these spaces they redefined love, giving her new names and contours, sequestering life away from death’s desire.

They fashioned intricate mirrors, curved lights that revealed the rot, the filth

And the broken order;

They wished for the world to become New.

As grown up children they branded burning words into autumnal atmospheres

With fireworks, crusaders’ eyes free of irony, shocking radio-waves…

They spewed rambling wild prophecies of futures without lies,

And foretold gray streets filled with poets waving cleansing vermillion flames….

But with the coming of winter, illusions of hunger, fear of the cold

They couldn’t keep their fires contained, they couldn’t keep still… Couldn’t wait!

And couldn’t return…

So they stepped forth into cynical streets and barren fields:

Wavingtheir free tickets they bought thousands of hot dogs that left a bad aftertaste,

Took drugs that scared them with unrelatable visions of forgotten Edens and hells…

Uncharted seas flashed through the fogs, and they called what they saw illusions

In their hearts, ever the children, they ached to return home, back to the womb;

But seeing their homes, they didn’t recognize them,

And the past was a giant who could only swallow them: it leaned over, it watched,

It criticized—- And they, trembling with endangered vanity, burst out!

Flaming, growing, consuming all past, and what naive nobility, what innocence!

But NOT tyranny, who took on the shape of an incorrigible girl-child

French kissing with its rosy mouth their vast organs of vanity

Throwing for them grandiose festivals of no consequence — rites of I’s

Where flames were forbidden, where sympathy was replaced by charity

Where they learned to loathe each other’s unmasked faces, and rightly so! … … … 

Spitting underneath waves of harrowing laughter.

————————————————————-

All world became just a hostile stage;

Or a fake painted sea upon which they were orphaned in a cardboard – - – Ship

Without a captain…

While every single one fought for the wheel,

Upon an unlit stage, while no one watched, the ship stood still.  

Some thought it meant that they’ve arrived. So, could it be that they have won?

 They left the hull, and setting foot upon a barren wooden floor,

They drafted charters for a freer world, prepared by values no one had thought…

Competitive and free, the mothers ate their newborn sons,

While fathers charted useless laws against the sick and the uncool,

And Mr. Jones sat frozen with old guilt, smelling a pixelated rose…

His son was crying over crowds: “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”

“Do you dig my new boat? You dig? Do you dig it?”

 ”(Drown me in my pool of children’s blood drown me, drown me, ma!)”

“My new hut, come over, come on over!

If we go bored with it, we can sit on the sill and throw pebbles in my pond.

Come on, come on… (You bitch, you god…)”

 ——————————————————————————

Some instead chose to brag about their gods….

And faced with subtle hints of being momentary,

One Easter evening, the universe just stopped.

“And was it ever worth it?” A little girl’s voice asked.

“It was a little holy… If that….”

A man stands still outside his lonely home, next to an empty prairie stretching on,

His life was just a rash result of discontentment.

His eyes are set upon a glass of melting ice.

Alone for years, each evening cast by the candle-light

Each evening reading from a dusty tome.

“My brother, You! Yes, you alone.

I dare you take on the promise of the novel human spark.

Be like a dying fish, be mad for air. Swallow the night!

And trample over galaxies, a lonely stare beyond the grain.

What could you see, except more madness lurking in each atom?!

Look beyond patience! You’ll find a madness made of accidents and morals.

Make it your own. Accept it. Wallow in the pain of regrets. Your pain, and only…

And don’t you sympathize with ones who’ve found forgiveness…

Inside warm homes of sympathy and luck… How could they know?!”

He shuts the tome and says:

“I rarely despair.

Because I know, I’ll be an elder man,

So handsome and so calm,

Sat at somebody’s feet.

Beside somebody’s throne.

Until I drop my burden, Blinded by the light…”

And he recalls a dreamy lucid smile in some forgotten drunken night.

And all that frail young wine, the drying flowers, time,

Lost in the suffocating ground.

Now and again the moon appears, a rabbit scuttles softly, and the wind sometimes breaths.

Well, that is all.

“That’s the passage of my life,” He thinks.

“If only labeled with a stamp. My loneliness is a masquerade for one. Nobody sees me when I am my own.”

And he walks off into the night, a rare island.

While Somewhere beneath stadium lights faceless champions fight.

And every hour one or another calls themselves the king.

The king forever.

“But, pardon me!” A voice attacks me from somewhere in the crowd.

“Why must you constantly remind us of our vulgar age? And reference the higher lore of yellow pages?

Are we not greater than all that?

We are the ones who trust the poisons and epiphanies

We thrust ourselves onto the most epic carousels!

And did we not construct amazing heavens others only dreamed of?

We slithered through the veins of a blue-blooded epoch, softly singing,

And slid our knives under the ribs of kings.

We’ve broken through the cages of the past.

We’ve made new worlds, new tongues,

And shared humanity with the class outcasts,

Creating the one great doe-eyed caste! We’ve given strength to ones who couldn’t do a thing,

 Except sit dumbly on that stage…”

I answer, rockety split, like let’s meet later at the carnival with our fists out: “Oh, sir?! But are you not that one,

That one who idolizes common items from the past?

The one with the gout, the speech impediment, with brains in your pillow, And a snake in your belly?

The one with a wallet in your heart

And your soul trapped in a million pieces of plastic?

That one who slowly commits suicide while smiling a cheshire smile?

Who gorges on the organic blood of children until he feels sick?

The one who gets his only thrills driving enormous cars off cliffs?

Are you not him?”

He mumbles slowly: “But I have foreseen all your illuminations!

So easily I’ll bind your lips. I am what I am, so draw back, fiend,

You’ll never understand…”

No, I smile, and shout: “My friends, grab that man and stuff his crevices with dirty cottons!

And let’s move! Reality must be reclaimed!

Let’s make amazing homes that move through the skies with us!

The dirty linen sheet will serve our curtains!

The cardboard boxes piled up, high as floors! On foliage we’ll lodge as we travel,

Building futures for each other, building Heaven!

Until some impossibly far-off roosters call Arouses us into a different dream…

But deck yourself now, fly out your cardboard window!

Be very careful not to fall.

Avoid the sun, And, please don’t stop yourself from making mockeries of neon

Stars and moons.”

My comrade, beggar, singer, worker, you.

My voice, Your voice, Sole soother of this neither pain nor pleasure…

As you fly off the stage your nerves will certainly remind you “Pain! Pain! Pain!”

You’d rather burn away. Or feel comforted by a gown. (It’s not too late to turn back now).

- – Shaved head in an adjustable bed, Regular meals, And promenades by the white windows.- – -

“Must you make it real, just so we see the very sad downfall of city saints?”

– -You’re feverous, shrouded in a bed. Not strong nor weak. Just bitter, passive. – - –

“Here lays a broken seeker! Hardly seeing what he sought.” Not everything nor nothing.

You get it.

“-Living?”

“-Is there really something else?” Comes my response.

(                                                                                            )

A childhood tune stuck in your head. Delirium becomes your deepest comfort.

And then you’re gone. (So where’s my fine future, oh sweet prince?)

Passed on, To join the blissed out seers…

Hanging out at the Elysium Fields…

But the pesky prophet’s voice remains.

“Hey now, so what exactly do you see?” I ask him’ fore he’s also gone.

“A silver crown of clouds amidst the violent skies

As two extremes connect, the landscape trembles,

And seas rush like wild horses through the land.

The wall across the watcher watches,

All spheres stop spinning, gyres break, as the cold air speaks back.”

He laughs, “And when this geological dance finishes, what do you think is left?”

And he yells in a column of voice: “A wave of intense quick dreams amidst all possible appearance! A glimpse into Apocalypse!”

I snicker: “Ghost bugs and opera at night, around the breast…”

(Planets and stars gone like raindrops, sparks… Endless worlds… useless.)

But I can no longer stand to see his half-opened eyelids!

From blanket towards the floor he falls. And back to sleep again.

Seeing real suns above countless seashores!

“Look out! It’s magic. Don’t see it? I guess you have to make a study of the shades and ashes.”

Poor child.

To make a perfect world one must be very handy…

Sane and fearless.

So, how could we (of all the people) choose to even start,

When all the things we must mind already…

With our lulled spirits full of bread and brandy

Fanfares of media ablaze around our clouded heads.

Work just to have a body,

Work for the cruel dreams of merriment and laughter,

The countless children…

“Well may it be so well, so well, swell, may they be well… “

So that their very laughter would resound

As bleeding little fists make our castles tremble… Just as soon as we give up…

We’ll stagger dumbly looking in pride upon the future saints.

Our caged donors of hope whom we’ve betrayed.

While we become so weak, only fit to lacerate ourselves,

Worthy only of tortures.

And what happens to our lightning rod bodies, animated lives, magic spirits?

Away they go, from home to store, to home, to work.

From house to house, we go and go!

With our rare gift cards of wisdom stenched with cheap deodorants of wit

Which carry us across, merely from one end to the another,

The journey dedicated to amusing others

At our own expense.

You might already know this, but, let me serve a quick reminder,

Lest you get too comfortable inside your skin.

Someday you will become unable to smell, or hear,

Nor think of anything beyond a slowly dimming screen.

Yes, it’s a joke.

And how much have you really seen?

With everything to spare,

We know life well enough to barter it for nothing,

And think that were getting something in return…

—————————————————–

Like this scene from a poisoned city on its last breath: A quarter flickers in the smoggy air, here’s to a silver galaxy,

A hollow ring resounds and dies away, 1.67 seconds,

“Infinite years of waiting for wealth”,

A lonely man in glasses picks it up and wonders

Looking up time after time,

And choosing not to go back home that day.

The morning grayness puts him down, he simply walks.

So let him walk until he falls.

He turns a corner by the flower shop and catches a girl’s fleeting smile.

And beside that smile, he knows there’s nothing much at all for him to find.

There’s nothing much at all for you to find.

That smile. Nothing to find.

Some dirty satori, oh… (Let him go, go, go, beyond the golden shore).

And he hears the voice of a saint:

“It ends with angels behind masks. Oh, yes it does.”

Another night as a teenage oracle sleeps,

And her world becomes reduced to but a foggy beach:

Where word is a sin, and only pairs of skeletal kids slowly stroll into a dark away,

And muses desperately toss themselves around and round,

Trying to get to us.

There’s no one left to criticize.

And who’s to say which side was right?

In strength, always illusion, in expression, always lies.

Whoever doesn’t feel absurd of the distant air between a pair of brains?

And wisdom’s no reprieve in this zoo.

When we laugh and dance, then we are oh so naughty,

I am a monster child, but so is everybody else.

But dancing is no answer.
 

And neither is a happy home,

For nothing ever promises long lasting comfort.

You might as well just bind yourself to something with your impossible despair.

But air and earth, for now, are there.

And dreams? Dreams tend to grow much colder.

Then shed away to clear the path for more.

From bed to bed, from dream to dream we go…

But, after all:

We always have… The warmth of our black hearths,

The sight of rosy dawns,

And secret dreams of futures

That may someday explode out from our bones, chattering teeth, so cold

And maybe we can yet find each other (a million couples sit at a gigantic drive-in screen)

(what a silly thought, rotting corpses in the dirt and lilies)

The wind carries living blood.

She turns to me and says “And maybe you can help me make an Eden of this cruel world…

“Don’t go!” she yearns, “…but  Matters not…”(trinkets, home videos, and graves… homes– oh)

When at best nothing is gone, and at worst we have a dying moment, on this long shore,

“What DO we have?” she screams.

A flash of startling beauty, trembling mosaics of flame and rain,

A bird flies into the sun’s distance, and behind its tail follows forever,

Beginning in the middle of the end…

Just beginning… for next from a once-barren earth sprouted up

Castles: The First Addendum to “Forever”

/every meal we were served stinkless clams, and it was always such a bad time, forever a bad time, then we lived in a houseless city, in those timeless times now forgotten, though still - like others - we too rotted back then, rusty motors in the burning light, a tiny kid pokes a sleeping dog’s eye with a stick, even rabid dogs sleep, all murderers were infants, a saint locked herself in a tomb in a cathedral’s attic, for a thousand years her flesh remained warm and soft, torrents of greasy sweat oozed from her arms and loins, each Sunday morning raining upon the congregation, healing the wounds of the blessed, burning through the flesh of sinners, outside the immaterial gates clowns fornicated in the dirty while whole generations hung eyeless from the walls, "I'll miss you when you're gone" were my true love’s last words, gouging out my left eye I left the city on an ass, the order found me floating in the Tiber, now I pray with them to the seven faces for the death of each false beginning, oh, but we are surely something, no children are born here, merely breathing light, that shall be your lover, and mine, behind masks all is light, breathing, leave it alone, what old smile bearing fangs/

On the green fields where the sun don't shine...
Faceless champions run.
A desperate rumble far beside the castles, 
Dreams melting in a grey morning,
Our Castles:
Floating on the waves...
And every night as time restarts,
A rotting leprous oracle groans:
"The world is a series of small calamities
Victories to nowhere, for no one at all".
He sits on the porch of a burnt out house,
On the once-fertile grounds –
"I remember summer… those heartland fields, 
Gone so long... Mary Pickford and the cinema screen."
Here's the weed-grass of youth deadening even in the dark:
Crumbling Lollipops and dusty museums. 
And yet a bird flutters by!
The oracle knows where the future begins,
But he won't say;
He watches our tiny life on a giant screen, chewing paper;
Grinning at the bloody game...
Old ladies throw nosebleed handkerchiefs from aluminum balconies,
The squires and the knights wrestle for the noose...
He sees himself – a teenage page – Sneaking a bill into his pocket
On a midnight shift.
There is nobody to see for once,
So anything goes.
The boy lingers on till another broadcast begins,
Then somberly stumbles home.