Viktoria (murtud suda*)

 
(* Estonian: broken heart)


what is a poet without a poem?
when they don’t come to me, I walk the old road
to find them  –  the strange soft ghosts.

I don’t eat, I swallow the thick air like peyote’, to achieve the visions.
I can attach metaphors & the monochrome of noir mirages, but I need
the edict to give it credence.

blasting from the sky are the furious drumbeats of Suicidal Romance,
as Viktoria sings ‘we are not alone.’ but I know she’s wrong.

through the fog, I can just make out the bodies of the fallen: enemy
troops & my comrades, lying so close together they could have been
friends. I was never near enough to look in my transgressor’s eyes,
but I felt his rifle, his knife. punji sticks that will kill you just as dead
if you trip a wire.

when war has eaten its reasons for being, there’s nothing to fight for.
I struggle to survive, chasing the passion in me that takes a female
shape. the girl who becomes a woman. the woman who becomes
a whore.

she waits in a sparse room; a candle on a bruised oak table, & next to
the candle, a book of old poems. on the bed, a stormy violent desire
spreads across my temporal mistress with marauding hands & drunken
lips, & she holds me off but a moment to blow out the candle.

I can speak of the rushing river of carnal sins, her body under me,
anguish flaring like tracers in the dark, an obscene gothic rock symphony
that crescendos & fades, & verses that say nothing & go nowhere…

when the peyote’ wears off, I’m alone on that dusty road, no woman,
no ghosts, lost in the artful torment of poetry & sex…


(Art: Max Mun Autrey)