Across the ice a baritone
Projects his notes of steel,
A tenor’s harmonizing
Adds that melancholy feel
And the glory of the voices
Flows out through alders bare
And the listeners weep for Russia’s soul
And the tragedy found there.


The tragic melancholy
Found in every Russian heart
Liberated by the sadness
A fine harmony can impart.
Of the monolithic yesterdays,
Those forgotten fields of dead
And that fire within the *****
Which numbs the agony of the head.


Dark stains along the timber wall
Wood fire’s stones make steam
It fills the room with stifling heat
Which sweats the bodies clean.
Red wheals raised on shoulders
Birch branches whip the back
Whilst companion tones of maleness
Speak in vectors women lack.


Red larches in the foothills
Gold lantern light on snow,
The vastness of ancient steppes
Of Central Asia grow.
A viola’s velvet passion
Sighs beneath a cottage door
And the sadness in sensation
Brings grown men to weep once more.


The vastness of the terrain
The hardness of the land,
The bitter cold of northern wind,
Each freezing winter spanned
By Siberia’s lashing gales,
White snow is metres deep
And turquois ice as hard as steel
Beneath which... rivers creep.


Dostoyevsky,Kruschev,
Rasputin and the Tsars,
Great Lenin, Marx and Trotsky
And the swords of Horse Hussars.
Gorbachev the great redeemer,
Poor Yeltsin’s pale white skin
And the ****** found in Stalin's smile
Span the politics of sin.


This great Russian melancholy
Lies deep within the soul
It’s a legacy of yesterday
Of her history's brutal goal.
It’s a product of the suffering
Inherent in the past
Endured by legions of the people
Then  dispensed with…
With a laugh!

  

Marshalg
@theBach
Mangere Bridge
13 April 2009

You can be cool with your leather jacket,
You can be hot with your nice lingerie,
You can be cold with your colorful words,
You can be warm with your kind smiles,
And you can be just right,
With a bit of air conditioning at night.

On an Inscription from Katya to Gary
in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used-Book Sale

Whatever happened to Katya and Gary?
Their names appear in an anthology
Of Pushkin in a nifty Everyman
Astray on a table of orphaned books

One hopes they read those sweet words each to each
Over Blue Mountain in a coffee shop
Forgetting to feed the parking meter
While planning lives of meaning, deep and rich

Or is each but a memory to the other -
Whatever happened to Katya and Gary?

Though keeping the necessary distance
I often retreat
Miss reading my sagacious move
Signs of inferiority or defeat,
Upstarts begin going out of their way
On me damages to inflict!

Nudging me out of
My shell
They adore
Turning my life a hell!

Black Friday: Casualty Lists at a Discount

When the last American has exhausted
The last extension on the last credit card
The last order is dropped by the last drone:
The last electronic talking flashlight

The last Your Team’s Name Goes Here baseball cap
With the patented adjust-o-matic
Sizing strap that will be the envy of
All the ‘way cool guys in the neighborhood -

Will then the drones be ordered far away
To search for credit on other planets?

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We print free verse about revolution
And deconstructing colonialism
The power and urgency of the story
Post-masculine dystopia redeemed

Visit our online submission system
Against the occupation resistance
As activist performance artisans
Who shape our unconventions for ourselves

Fists of ink against oppressionism
And that is why we track your usage

We thank you for your thoughts and prayers;
your inspiring moments of silence.
Yet these do not one blessed thing
to protect us from gun violence.

The constitution guarantees
the right to lethal Weapons?
Are Life and Liberty not worthy, then,
of sensible protections?

Those diagnosed with PTSD;
The schizophrenic and Bi Polar
Should not be given lethal means
to wipe out holy rollers.

We thank you for your thoughts and prayers
We’re sure they’re well intended.
Just the same we’d like to see
These brutal massacres ended!

February - 45,000 people in one week watch performances of rokabirī music by Japanese singers at the first Nichigeki Western Carnival.

February 14 – The Iranian government bans rock & roll, claiming that this form of music is against the concepts of Islam and is a health hazard. Iranian doctors warn of the risk of injuries to the hips from the "extreme gyrations" of rock & roll dances.

March 12
Billie Holiday is given a year's probation by a Philadelphia court following her arrest and guilty plea on narcotics possession charges in 1956.

In Hilversum, Netherlands, 'Dors, mon amour' sung by André Claveau (music by Pierre Delanoë, text by Hubert Giraud) wins the third annual Eurovision Song Contest for France. Domenico Modugno places third for Italy with 'Nel blu, dipinto di blu' which, retitled 'Volare', will reach No. 1 in the US Billboard Hot 100, and will win two Grammy Awards next year for Record of the Year and Song of the Year for 1958.

and amongst other things, Sylvia Plath writes a poem,
a modest insertion to the world of history and chess,
but nonetheless more spectacular -
all that candy, all that ******* candy,
the smiles the pristine pomp - the goody suede shoe gimmicks,
but there she is, ravenous woman of the swamp,
one of the Graeae - question is, one tooth cannibal
shared or one eye to see Pericles?
ever wonder why poets solely keep the Grecian myths
alive and not involve themselves with saintly tales
akin to Assisi? boring as cow **** fried with shrimps,
that's me and father jack (father ted, a sitcom)
on the matter... but seriously, the celestial beast that
Sylvia Plath is given her housewife circumstance,
no girl this dying age would write such magnifique
superstition - well, that's pomp in-itself,
i don't know, call me stupid, but globalisation is
hardly an argument to expect being well informed,
i have a graveyard for a library, or the other way round,
i'm reading books that desire to be kept in a winery,
for example... well, anyone will do to fit the following
words: a château 1865 - pompous ******* 'n' all,
but you see, what gets me going is 1958 and the poem
Perseus: the Triumph of Wit over Suffering.
i don't care who won the chess tournaments,
or if Elvis was a high-tonne larder than usual -
whatever the hip-replacement tactic of Iranian doctors
was like, for ****'s sake... this is a religion that
puts emphasis on prayer and "music" five times a day...
the Islamic call to prayer is sang, it's not hamstrung,
it's not smoked salmon, it's not Catholic petition
murmur, it's sang... ting a lick'ah ling...
******* church-bell uvula (i know i swear, oath words,
i told you, in polish kurva is a conjunction word
akin to the Achilles heel,
mind you, a cure seeing **** than seeing f&!k
might help with the **** addiction, and...)
i mean i wept listening to an adhan once,
but please don't get me wrong,
if you'd take Mozart to be rain tapping,
and a bunch of cooking saucers to be a drum-kit what then?!
i don't like Islam for one reason... i love music too much,
and, from the way i see it, Islam doesn't like music,
even though i don't like castrated choir boys either
penetrated by the almighty papa who pretends to
be a Jew with his kippah, i'd rather listen to music than
that godforsaken recitation about 72, and how
pomegranate juice will sustain me better than
a whiskey on the rocks... the end, pa pa!