I.

 

Olivier Messiaen.

 

Figure in an empty landscape,

snow, siberia, sokurov.

The feeling of being out

there, all exposed to the

elements, and yet the music

makes you feel as though

you are alone in

an empty room.

 

Chords. Black metal is

built on them, riffs, and

yet you can make them

on the piano, an instrument

not ideal for repetition.

 

Mozart rapes Messiaen.

Give up the landscape.

Discordancy ascribes its

own value.

 

Negate the assertion.

Re-locate Miami to France.

 

There is a feeling that

Europe’s history is all

one big opera, a transference

of states and status.

How harsh the ideals fall

when dropped careless

from the palace windows.

 

II.

 

Tufts of a forgotten sentiment, ride pink tank towards dream. I am thirsty, filmmaker says. Everything is pink, shot through a pink lens, in another film, he’ll use an old woman as a chance to go meet the enemy, feed the similarities. Pink haze, pink landscape, pink heat, pink lens, all a fleshy pink to mark the transition, a snowy landscape to searing Tajikistan in the apex of summer, hell can take many forms. Not even Siberia’s cold salvation. He transports us there, we see the cute Russian soldiers, Sokurov notes their age – twenty-two, twenty-three, he guesses – and they all could be ambushed at any minute, the filmmaker dying with them, and yet he continues on the journey, what, after all, is his wisdom next to their promise of youth?

 

Rimbaud wrote that poem about soldiers’ cocks, was it all a deep fantasy? He has a thing for Japanese composers, now it is possible that that country will be largely no more – can a culture continue to thrive without a Heimat? I think

 

No one can predict the combined wreckage that the 21^st century is destined to bring down on us, perhaps there will be no more cultures. Atomic wastoid, I look in my cat’s eyes and see beauty: He is a European cat and he has seen/knows culture.

 

I will walk my way through

to the other side of this world

knowing

yr doubt

is greater

than the highest risk

I might take

to secure it.

 

No one loves me greater

than you at this moment,

through yr hatred.

Yr hatred of me is legendary, I can taste it in my soup.

 

I am too timid to consume you, to consume most, yet I continue to fantasize fornication, o Europa, yr abortion flecked stationary across the horizonless

surmise.

 

I wear you out, I know, you are so thin, you tell yr friends everything we talk about.

They form their opinions on me this way, hardened variables. A sailor

 

cums inside us, Messiaen has a fit, shits all over the piano,

a glass of water, food

coloring for the emotions –

such an American idea

to distort all symptoms

of entropy.

 

Oh and the calm meditation on death I thought about that too, I will not date you, I am only drinking.

 

Come over here let me whisper something into yr glass eye, whenever I am at home I am never separate from the source of yr empowerment, actually I hate this raunchy domesticity, give me a lamb and I’ll call it a cat.

 

Aleksandr Sokurov was born to a family of peasants. Actually I know nothing about him, I should wikipedia his legacy. Now, I hear, he is making a movie of Faust. Faust is the one course I failed in college, I wasn’t patient enough to sit through the exam.

 

I heard you’re a smoker now.

Such a bad choice, you’ll

end up like the wolf

outside of heaven.

The evening massacre.

Maybe it’s something in

the cold tundra

that allows one to

stay spiritual.

 

III.

 

It is because of the vastness that we cannot be protected.

 

The silence in the hollows.

 

“Our surroundings blend into the dust”; sepia tones.

 

The clouds are yellow in a blue sky.

 

Rain on the rioters outside my window.

 

The tireless protractment of her empire. Soldier’s smile. They look like corpses in their sleep. The clouds at night can somehow be seen. A different color, however. Darkness has a way of.

 

Drowned in a river of silence.

 

IV.

 

Shells in the landscape, a

 

sultry day to appear.

 

One finger too fast to

 

learn, clothing hangs out

 

to dry. Young soldier stares

 

at knee, horsehung, dayglo

 

tomorrow. I am not on top

 

the embattlements.

 

The crackling of food,

 

somewhere near death.

 

V.

 

About Russia, I don’t know, I’ve never been. Let this all be here please. The soldiers. I want an archenemy, too, masturbating. The gentle fade. Soldier in the landscape, rest on elbows. Elbows have lots of hair on them. I don’t know why I’m honest. Boy asks what time it is; a stone in the soil. It’s naïve to think all these wars. He stares them all down with his camera, one by one, trying to find an answer.

 

VI.

 

Maybe he wants more than he knows, how to communicate. I am not unlike the others.

 

They cry: New Year’s Eve, an absent friend, the war. We are all mortal. A Russian sentiment. The hard kernel that designates deference, lived. Today the oscillation varies. And now we imitate wind among the gunshots.

 

VII.

 

Those soldiers they eat. No one wants to talk. It’s only Tuesday. Today is Sunday. Cat on my lap watching them, I’ve lost track of time. Too much salt…I’ve heard his first film is set in an insane asylum.

 

He likes them, it seems, because they fight to keep what it means to be Russian alive.

 

His forehead the river.