BISCUITS

Rain darkens the door

Again. But it is only 

March, you say. Sure,

it is always March somewhere.

Somewhere, surely, it is March when

Accounts are settled, plans made

before you skive off for some fresh juice

and check your phone again. Bad idea:

WhatsApp messages from last summer 

when the world almost declared ceasefire

at long last, and promised to deal

En flores.

Turn up, turn up again and again.

And it just might happen again.

It might not, of course, but it might!

Discipline, love, a search for something…

…she might turn up as well. 

You know better, of course, but you never know...

...reassuring words are 

a Professional Requirement.

Enjoy your biscuits for now.

TRENCH FOOT

 

The important thing is to keep your socks dry.

The important thing is to

keep your socks dry, as the cold seeps

into your bones, and the damp.

Somewhere an old woman in a cramped hut

watches television, and you are called upon

to buy her a larger house.

 

Not long ago, you tried in vain. To show up

and proclaim, ‘I am not a cannibal!’ Yet to grow up

among them in libraries, monasteries, and the local philharmonic

is to develop a taste

for flesh and fatalism. What could be done,

what indeed. The mogilizatsiya of the soul:

 

After a while, you even enjoy these games

Yourself. The blood tastes sweetest

when they are little, dripping

from the green of a surgical gown.

Yet there is also the tiredness

of Monday mornings, of the din,

of stale cigarettes amidst the unquiet

Crossfire.

 

You think of Shostakovich,

Who stood up to one kind of moustache

and not so much to the other, Our kind.

Easier to be brave in the hypothetical…

 

…on one side peace, on the other, land, flat-screens and washing machines.

 

Naturally,

I chose

The latter.