PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

". . . Mudraya partiya bolshevikov!"

---Vasily Lebedev-Kumach, "Hymn Of The Bolshevik Party"

1.  ". . . Segodnya my gorduyu pesnyu poyom . . ."

The assignment that day for our squad read:

"Five ordered shot, four of them queers; the

"other, a Poet"; a routine execution, one of the

lingering effects of the Revolution that made

our country great again, guided by the Party's

wisdom that became the envy of all of the world

we allowed to become our allies.  You, yourself,

know how we always hoped, in the same old way,

resilient hope that on this particular, ordinary day

these five would be the last of their kind (queers and

poets---we did not recognize a difference, even if

one existed; all of them alike, all of them covert

subversive, counter-Revolutionaries and ingrates).

But no end appeared timely to the difficult and

strenuous efforts to cleanse and purge our lands, and

our work remained relentlessly exacting, even demanding.

The purge of slack morals by blood is not easily achieved.

2.  ". . . O partii samoy moguchey na svete . . ."

Oh, wise inclusive triumphant and trumpeted Party in

whom all that keep faith with the nation's greatness

are included the the necessities of their contribution---

their labors, no matter how humbly performed;

their devotion, no matter how quietly expressed.

Even the decorated marksmen summoned here, the 

executioners---experienced experts at their calling--- 

proudly belonged to the nation, the Party, and the very

fabric of the victorious mantle in which we gladly

clothed and adorned the nation.  They, too, were the

Heroic of our society, the exterminators of these

seditious dissidents whose perversity has spread the

plague of discontent among us, especially among the

youthful and innocent.  I name and honor them again, the

Heroic of our society---and where, by then, were the

corrupt distorters of reportage, the prostitutionists of

interpretation, and the fakers of the daily news who

had once dared to call these Heroes mere insurrectionists?

3.  ". . . Izmennikov podlykh gniluyu porodu . . ."

One Poet of Faggotry and four queers:  two couples; the

old, tweedy, arthritic, a pair of drones (though the

queens to whom they were attracted had contributed

nothing to the survival and expansion of the hive); the

younger---lithe, sleek, long-haired (curls in

profuse, and artificially purple, cascades falling

almost to their slender waists); clad in velour (or was it

velvet) bell-bottoms, militantly shoeless and shirtless,

whose last request was to die---barefoot and torsos

bared---in each other's arms (a request, I might add, that

Judge Caverning Goiter had granted, not long before he

himself became suspect of divisive and diverse sympathies). 

We were surprised to learn the Poet was traditionally married:

his wife, a female, had spent that morning at the gates to the

Citadel of Judicious Death---wailing like lunatic bereft,

yowling and yammering like a stealer of lost elections---until a

well lobbed, ovoid stone, launched from the strong arm of a

much commended cadet-apprentice, fatally fractured her skull.

4.  ". . . Ty grozno smetayesh s puti svoyego."

Tasks like this are always most successfully performed by the

most dedicated whom the ever dwindling minority of effete

rejectionists prejudicially label "fanatics."  I had, from

time to time in my surveillances, overheard these men,

talking casually, even unguardedly, in the ostensible

privacy of their barracks, about their dreams---rushing

rivers running red beneath crimson skies with blood clouds

clotting into blackened crusts.  Having heard their

rapturous descriptions, I understood how gladly they

assembled---with due respect to the military uniformities---in

two ranks (those kneeling to aim at the hearts, or thoracic

regions; those standing to aim at heads that always explode so

dramatically; a sight, and process, that never stales for me,

even after so many replays of the footage on maximal slow motion).

After the smoke cleared, and we detected no movement at all

among the condemned (other than---of course---the involuntary

twitching as the corpses completed their dying), the executioners

marched out just like close order drill.  The echo of their marching

jackboots lingered in the corridor, as I stared at those four

adolescent feet (those bodies' faces having been obliterated),

becoming the more pale, the toenails painted with purple enamel.

5.  ". . . Ty gordost naroda, ty mudrost naroda . . ."

I do not presume to know what condemned talked about, to

pass the time of their final hours of life in this world they so

blithely yet ineptly betrayed.  What do fags and fairies

discuss in the face of certain death after due process and

condemnation by a jury of competent judges in good standing as

certified and maintained by the Party?  Did they discuss

feelings and affections, desires and the satisfactions of those

desires, shrimp scampi and the appropriate hang of the

uncircumsised, or of pastel pink drapes acquired in the musty

smelling thrift stores that once populated the now defunct Village?

But I know what condemned talk about:  carefully orchestrated

upheavals in every major continental city; the stately media

silenced in some kind of countrywide cataleptic seizure; the

Party, the unassailable, formidable, redoubtable Party,

cast down---broken---shattered---crushed---like the

heroic statutes of the triumphant, trumpeted leadership,

toppled by noosed ropes tangled around them and yanked and

jerked (jerked off?) by rebellious adolescents, most (or

many) of them queer; quarrelsome and querulous, quizzical, and

flagrantly flamboyantly queer, shoeless or barefoot on the

lawns and pavements of our commerces, despite the signage

declaring the specific restrictions that the revived and

reorganized legislatures have overwhelmingly declared superfluous.

6.  ". . . plamenny geniy . . ."

What are the chief delusions of the condemned without appeal?---

that time accelerates and diminishes in ways no clock can measure?;

that innocence is undetectable in ways no court transcript can declare";

that no last meal can be prepared quite like old Grandma used to cook?;

that each prepared shroud and coffin opens upon a bottomless, lightless pit?

But the last, lingering delusion of the condemned---(who have walked those

final last paces across a polished floor that is neither long nor slow enough;

who lean in collapse against high walls of gray stone, riddled with holes in

which the brass casings of embedded shells, sometimes laced with a fleck or

two of blood or brains can yet be discerned; who gaze (with the emptied, but

still habituated, instinct of hope) at the skylights through which the

morning's glow is grandiosely garroted even at this height of summer, this

solstice)---that the grim and focused eyes of the executioners precisely

aligned before me are exactly like those of the many condemned whom I

accompanied into this room, not then as victim but as their vicar.

J-Called

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