Russia or the Weakness of Photography

–Andrei Codrescu

Over the landscape walk the mailboxes disguised as whores.
We drunks walk into them and maim our pricks.
The snows threaten the idiots with a vast maze.
They will be seeking lifetimes for their hammers.
They will waste their strength pulling sickles out of the necks
of patient Ukrainian peasants, photographed by God.
As the idiots struggle, I will close shop, bid adieu to the super-
market where I stood for the language, I will
strike a number of unlikely alliances.
Riding the Trinity like a sled, Vladimir Mayakovski hits the wall.
Solzenitsin, with a mountain of Christmas packages containing
millions of little concentration camps, stumbles on a
banana peel and goes straight through Carol Burnett, out her
middle.
Awkwardness awaits all members of this genre.
There is one commercial only in the entire history of the world:
God, and it only comes on once a year, at night.
In it, He says this: “Any man (mensch) with a maimed prick who
seek shelter from the snow, must first bury his axe.”
Behind Him, a thousand doors open as if the piggybanks in the
Sky
are broken, and showers of gold coins come down on you.
Russia has unfastened her skirts.
There is a storm of icons, re-raging Saint Georges, feathers,
feathers, basements full of paper Stalins, hairpins,
lutes, knock knock who’s there, short prayers.
Meat! Clocks! Geography! Time! All Go Boom!

THE CRUCIAL
HAS BEEN NAMED AFTER THE CROSS
THE HISSING CROSS
THE SAMOVAR

These, comrades, are teethmarks on the wall.
I made them out of boredom.
I lie in a clean bed now under the gaze
of ten faithful scribes working
on my theory of the Great Central Sorrow.
The moon shines from a whorl of blue snow.
Through the baroque dacha door loaded with wooden saints
comes woman on horse Alice Codrescu, and says:
I come to change your punctuation!