The city's shrouded in smoke today
smoke coats my mouth, throat & eyes

& I know, I know.
       I should be writing in form,
in rhyme - villanelles, sonnets, terza rima
      some say there's too much free verse, some say, it's like
everyone's jumped on the bandwagon
       yet the most of the magazines still all want rhyme
                 but sometimes this is just the tune
                                    your heart sings, a broken smile
                                    & the way the images build up
                                        waiting to sail like ships in the harbor


& besides, should we really be writing in villanelles when we are the Mad & I see now, the best minds of our generation, the gifted,

the naked wastrels of the coming apocalypse,
talking to lamp posts, screaming of Ginsberg's Moloch

& the wrongs they did us, yet not destroyed even as we scream locked
behind whitewashed walls in razor-blade glint & halogenic

glow of ECT or walk the empty streets at guerilla dawn
& dusk, bearing the ample weight of our drugged-up minds

like those martyrs of the old Soviet Union & clinging
on to memoirs of our stolen, interrupted, spiritual awakening,

searching for the redemption of litter in this hobo life, 
changing countries like some change bed sheets,

others rooted by the invisible chains of familiarity & home, still calling
for the road, oh Kerouac, the fallen angels of tomorrow strung out on sweet

childhood memories & jazz in starved sunsets,
picking themselves up to pick at their scab wounds,

spitting at corrupt governments, bitter with alcohol,
writing poems of unrequited love to poets

far better than us, while Elvis croons
in the background & a Baboushka spits sunflower seeds

in the Russian town of my ancestors
& an open air film plays in black & white

& this colorless summer is nearly over
& they still haven't lifted their sanctions

them with their stone gods of war & psychiatry,
always lining up the next undesirables :

you could be next, yes you with the rainbow eyes
you the believer, you the dreamer of visions

Oh pity them, the children of smoke,
blind to the vagabond, the poet, the lover

lost children always seeking out the same roads
the city is shrouded in smoke

& I wonder if it's not always been there
& if we're living amongst blind men

ones that never read poems
or else how could all this happen

I found that old wedding photo we lost
behind a doll in our daughter’s room.
Russian, as it happens, the doll that is -  
I can read some significance in that:  
so full of themselves, they miss the bleeding
obvious. I wiped the dust from off its surface,
made you 21 again and placed us

on the bookshelf where P meets Q.
I’d have liked it before your favourite author
but her shelf’s too close to the ground.  
All my books are still in alphabetical order;
I wake at 7 to clean and tidy,
progressing in a clockwise direction,
starting at the front door and ending in the bath.  

I compare it to my parents’ wedding picture
that’s hanging next to the dining room door:
they’d a bigger cake, more friends and relations,
dressed black and white, a formal occasion;
contemplative, no eye for the camera.  
My mother’s fuller in the face than I remember
and isn’t that an ashtray beside the cake?

I blow these pictures up out of proportion
trying to discover germs of the future:
leukaemia, cancer and emphysema
buried within a forgotten Baboushka.
How happy we appear! My Mum said never
had I looked so handsome, like Richard Gere.
Perhaps that’s the joke I’m laughing at.

Behind us I trace the faintest whisper
of the tower blocks tumbled in ‘88.
As we’re cutting the cake, your face
burns with embarrassment    
or anticipation of the sauce to come.
I can feel the grip that you have on my arm,
as if I might be the first to depart.  

When lights fade I think I can hear you breathing,
but it’s central heating or a noise in the loft.
I close the windows to keep your scent in  
and reach out to touch an amputation -
I said we shouldn’t buy a bed this wide.  
You never see pictures taken at funerals
unless somebody important has died.