Me           

and Paulyander

By Yuriy Bilokonsky

First Printed 2009

by

Yuriy Pavlo Bilokonsky

To be found through the Internet at:

YuriyBilokonsky.newsvine.com

yuriypbilokonsky@gmail.com

www.myspace.com/yuriys

These poems are dedicated

to Paulyander. He went missing

and is most likely dead, unless

he went South. He was last seen

heading North, but I pray

he went South. An annoying

and destructive creature,

his every word sounded

like the curse of a crippled child.

But he was pretty and sometimes

I forget he’s gone.

Me And Paulyander

By Yuriy Bilokonsky

My Parrot Says to the Street Across the Glass

There is nothing to write down

and no way to write it.

What’s worth saying is said

what’s worth repeating

is repeated.  And what’s worth

remembering is remembered.I Read History Like He Looks Out the Window

I miss the trees where they used to be

when the Erie braves ran through them 

for miles, carrying words 

like lions swimming 

beneath the waving leaves

of a forest with no borders.

Now sheared oaks, holding

rubber-gloved copper wires,

have obsoleted messengers

in the land of the braves,

and every path is concrete

for metal turtle shells to roll along

on black wheels.  

In the dead trees’ silent conversation

whole worlds live leaping

throughout the wires.

But no one can touch

the Internet, the invisible web spidering together every corner of the world,

trapping infinite words like bugs.  Some

to be tasted.  Some

to be swallowed. Some 

few to be chewed, 

chewed and digested.

The rest left imprisoned

in unbegun moments.

There Are None Left Over For Sentencing

The caterpillar laughs, lying

on a mushroom, cloud

of smoke streaming from his mouth

at the end of the world.

He’s laughing.  When He explodes

He’ll be a butterfly.

What About Us?

When everything has wound down 

and the stars have all burned out, 

so that you can’t even 

hold a conversation with them anymore, 

like Icarus 

they rose 

too high too far did too many

drugs too many times 

and now

they’ve come to this sitting

like vegetables at the end

of time, and no God steps

out of shadows, laying hands

on them to heal them; no peace

swallows them like diamonds

sleeping in a cave; no rest

for stars, just that endless oasis

without water in the eternity

of nothing night that fills the gaps

 between exhausted sparks and everything ends:

what about us?

We Look Out from the Window

feeling nothing of it.

It is winter.  Snow 

is on the ground and I

can’t even feel the glass.

Not when I watch Mother Mary weep.  

I can’t feel the roof 

when the sky is raining

blood.  Forty days

forty nights.  It’s all the same, 

beneath the Bodhi tree.  

It’s all the same.  

An ark, a covenant, a basket.  

It’s all the same 

to the executioner.

He doesn’t even look.

He Doesn’t Even Look

The Lamb pulled the wool

over every eye when they killed Him.  

They didn’t know that He wanted to die.  Man

didn’t know that He wanted 

to be cooked

in the sun and stabbed

in the gut.  He wanted

that crown they gave Him.

He wanted to serve. To live

is to suffer.  And who doesn’t

want to live?

We See Buddha Standing

on the mountain 

in the cold above the rain,  

miracles springing up around him,

drawing every god and devil to gaze

blank around his wisdom and bow 

as understanding flows from tongue

to ground in a blessed eternal moment

that constantly keeps growing

with the vibrations of his words.

He could not have

known himself,

but only dealt with it,

if not for the prophecies

surrounding him at birth,

causing his childhood seclusion

in that palace 

with delights for walls, 

where still he suffered. 

Escaping them he found

the four directions were

birth, old age, sickness, death.

Dharma was the center,

the only virtue with no opposite,

no reverse.  There’s no escaping

those four noble truths.  

They are the mountain. 

They are the rain.

Fold the Path

Every footstep is foreshadowed

by the one that came before

on a board of little pieces

in every shade of glass.

If only you could find

some way to change

them and make them

let you go.  Could stand

above the ground so that you 

don’t cast the shadow 

that rules over your life.

If you could only see it

in a clear round crystal

And enter it.  And follow it 

straight through the floor 

and use it as a door 

to a surface free of dust, 

knicking past the walls 

of the cave that surrounds 

our lives and bodies, to a place 

beyond objective names 

where the dead grass stains 

of time’s passage

no longer remain.

Caesar Took His Life

Caesar took his life in his hands

when he put on Alexander’s boots

and though he wore them longer

they never did quite fit

quite right.  They gave him

these awful blisters the historians

don’t like to talk about.

The historians don’t like to talk

about the thousand feet

that walked this ground

and have faded from our view,

those rippling crowds sucked

into the wake of the Republic.

The Republic

It is in Plato’s Cave that the blind

lead the blind through empty 

echoing halls bereft, empty

halls, empty of steady light.

The flames dance on the walls

but no one sees their shadows.

Instead they play at industry,

mass producing crowns.

They fashion golden crowns

as they march to embellish the head 

of the column so that they do not lose the way

as they follow blind behind, excreting everything

and despairing at the scent of fresh air because

the spiteful sun would burn their sightless eyes.

In Plato’s Cave the invisible walls bring people

together, clasping hands and calling out 

when alone.  And families flock 

in the wake of the ever changing

forward guard, bound like rope woven

together through sympathy and fear.

Lovers press together, embracing

one another because the surest

light that they can see lies

in the sparks of kindred

spirits meeting.  All are trailing

blind behind as wise men take

the lead, eternally striving ever

to progress through the dark.

Confidently striding through

the murk and with no gauge

for triumph but longevity.

Durability.  Success.   

One compass traded

between them with the hope

to guess at fate as it is passed down

the line it reads,

“In the Land of the Blind

the one-eyed man is mad.”

In Cleveland

We read of Caesar

of the Pillars of Hercules

of how hard things are to move.

We don’t see the shadows

of the ships that pass between.

We know nothing of their mermaids

and their storms.  I want to shake

the hand of the Great Leviathan

who swallows everything.

Even the memory of my birth.

King and Captain

My brother says Leonard Cohen

is too depressing.  He plays happier

tunes on his guitar when he can

get his wife to let him.

He was my keeper for a while

and my parents claim he raised me.

I say he was a poor fit in both functions.

His pride made him take the lead.

His shame kept him from choosing

a direction.  He’s the captain

of the Flying Dutchman who

plays fiddle in the crow’s nest,

barking orders too high up 

to be taken clearly and too garbled

for even him to know if he speaks

anything but gibberish.  Still he’s loud 

enough to be heard above both the calm 

and the storm.  Still each syllable carries 

the bluster of command and the gust from 

his lungs, from his flapping lips, the babble 

is strong enough to fill the sails and hot 

enough so that the boat floats above the waves. 

He’s the engine of his misery, a martyr

who won’t die.  His destination is vague

and pretty as an overcast sky.  He’ll pass

through Hell smiling for spite and in Heaven,

he’ll sneer without knowing it.  A born leader.

Leonard Cohen is too depressing for him 

but then the man can drive a stone 

to tears without so much 

as a note of blame.

He’s Just a Dream on a Page

When I swim the Rubicon

Paulyander rides my shoulder

whispering words from works

I wish I read, “Beware the flies

and marsh.  They will give you

Malaria.  And if you do not

have sickled cells you’re bound

for bouts with harsh hysteria.”

I show him Yorick’s skull.

He flies shrieking from the river.

He doesn’t understand a thing.

Death is never real.

We all live on in books, 

I scream to the nothing of the night 

and in the city of the Angels I look 

to find God’s light, but God

is dead, the German said.  I like

to think he’s napping.  But how

can anybody tell?  Can’t peak

your head through the womb

and if you did what’d you see?

We could all just be His dream.

Then if He wakes we disappear.

He can only write so much

in that journal He keeps by

His bed before it all fades

away, completely lost. Nothing

to write down, no way

to write it.  What He can keep is

history.  The rest of us are dead.

If those who don’t exist can die.

We Could All Be His Dream

Lincoln freed the slaves, Hell, he freed the nation.  

By conquering the Confederation, founded on states’

self-determination, he brought about emancipation 

and the tyranny of liberation.  Now self-government

is the condensation on selected books of education, replaced in reality by unlawful taxation, unfamiliar

representation, central bank controlled inflation and 

prescription medication mandated over contemplation..

Lincoln freed the slaves but could he do the same for us?

Maybe, if he hired John Henry to pound away

at our chains.  Henry’d put his heart and soul in it

but in the end both would have to break, and then

the robots would take over and we’d spend our lives

just reading about them while machines did all the work.

They’d build our houses and our streets. They’d tell us

when to walk and when to not.  They’d solve

our mysteries.  They’d write our histories.

They’d play our music for us.

The Illumination Company Band

would be put out of a job.  Krishna

would set down his flute.  Buddha

would make a basket of his drum

Jesus would uncross His fiddle

and Midas would stop singing.

The Prophet would have nothing

left for his camera to film.  They’d

all just be standing there forever

silent when they used to play

the rhythm and the blues

to anyone who cared

to listen.

Whenever I Wake Up

I drag my self from my bed

with a world etched in dreams

still orbiting my head.

I have to play detective 

just to find out who I am.  

The paintings on my wall 

my brother did of Orpheus 

passing through the the gates

of Hell with Tantalus and Icarus

at his back and the one of his lyre

with Atlas standing over it holding

polygons above his head hardly

even pass as evidence.

Hamlet tells us Fortune 

is a harlot.  That’s another word 

for whore.  Anyway that answers 

nothing, but, if true, it follows that Fate 

must be a shrew and somehow

the two of them are holding

hands as they go strolling streets

each day where Fortune lies

with everyone as Fate

wears their wedding bands.

Shakespeare Buried Hamnet

I’ve heard that shovels that part

the Earth for the caskets of our children

are the hardest to hold.  They are made

of lead and gold.  Too heavy for the ground, 

they bathe in blood and bone.  

My grandfather used a rusting rifle 

to chase the devils from the graves 

of his forefathers when freedom 

was defeated in the steppes of World War II.

The Twisted Cross, the Hammered

Sickle, they hounded the tall grass

of his home.  He and his brothers fought

as the great red bear came batting down

his door, saying his porridge was the property

of the State.  Through frosted nights,

empty skies and the ant-hill prisons

of his enemies, he fought.  As the Jews

were burning in the West and in Jerusalem

returning, in an unseen patriotic army

he fought for the land that was his home.

Fascists?  Communists?  Militarists

are rapists with ideals instead of sperm.

First the Nazis then the Commies came,

following the same orders in different uniforms.

Dust guerrillas, the insurgents misted 

and were spent in missions with no hope 

of help or victory they fought and won and ran.  

They clung to the Earth where their blood was planted

before Noah left his ark.  From camp to camp

Dido flowed like a river with no bed.  Through

Galicia where his father’s family fished in what

has been Poland since before the Holodomor

to Austria and Germany in the carcass

of the war that ended war he drifted.  Until

finally he came to be sitting on the steps

in Philadelphia.  He sits there in what

I imagine was a pinstripe suit and a Bogart 

hat with not a word in his mouth.  

Not a possession to his name. 

He washes dishes for sixty hours, 

sixty hours, sixty hours 

every week for less than I make 

in half a day if I call in sick.  

He works, he eats, he sleeps until time

pulls him to Babunya, the old

woman who held me when I was happy

as a naked baby.  She was younger then than

I am now.  Time sails him to here where

he has retired from servicing machines and now,

now his hair has retreated from his scalp, his

wrinkles have annexed his face, and his knees

have surrendered their cartilage.  But he lets me

live upstairs from him for nothing

in exchange, and he pays me to drive 

him anywhere he wants to go, usually

the grocery store or bank, and all 

he asks of me is that I be

careful in everything I do.

He buried his son too, 

and you’ll never know his name.

Into the Mirror

Every morning I drag

myself to the bathroom

where the mirror is.  And

every morning it lies to me.

It tells me there is nothing 

I can know it cannot show 

the world.  I shave the whiskers

from my face and find I’m not a lion 

as in my head I am digging 

through a pile of lies for the string 

that holds the Truth.  And it pricks 

holes into my brain’s fingers

as I grasp like a blind man 

through the needles I perceive.

I finally get my shoes on 

and it occurs to me I don’t need

to remember my name or my face 

they’re right here with me 

at the only place I cannot see 

except in the mirror where everything

is reversed and every morning it lies

to me repeating that damned curse it says,  

“Remember Yuriy, there’s nothing 

to you I cannot see.  There’s nothing

I can’t show the world. There never will be.”

The Metaphysical Court

Saint Peter is still assembling

the Metaphysical Court to examine

the case of my dead uncle

and the forced starvation 

of Ukraine.

They’ve got a lot of dead

to sort through.  You see, 

there’s no Time where They are 

from and an infinite shortage

of names and faces.  They went

and combined my uncle with Ukraine

and confused the two with Hamnet.

One was Shakespeare’s son and the other

was something outside tragedy, but to Them 

they are one and the same.

They still haven’t reached

anything approaching

a verdict. Their word

for victim and suspect is pretty

much the same and They have

no mode of memory.

And so I know my history

the only way I can,

as my parrot knows the world

past the window, standing feathered

in his cage, as a soul caught 

in a blizzard, eternal in the snow 

knows what it is to burn.

    Me           

and Paulyander

By Yuriy Bilokonsky

First Printed 2009

by

Yuriy Pavlo Bilokonsky

To be found through the Internet at:

YuriyBilokonsky.newsvine.com

yuriypbilokonsky@gmail.com

www.myspace.com/yuriys

These poems are dedicated

to Paulyander. He went missing

and is most likely dead, unless

he went South. He was last seen

heading North, but I pray

he went South. An annoying

and destructive creature,

his every word sounded

like the curse of a crippled child.

But he was pretty and sometimes

I forget he’s gone.

Me And Paulyander

By Yuriy Bilokonsky

My Parrot Says to the Street Across the Glass

There is nothing to write down

and no way to write it.

What’s worth saying is said

what’s worth repeating

is repeated.  And what’s worth

remembering is remembered.I Read History Like He Looks Out the Window

I miss the trees where they used to be

when the Erie braves ran through them 

for miles, carrying words 

like lions swimming 

beneath the waving leaves

of a forest with no borders.

Now sheared oaks, holding

rubber-gloved copper wires,

have obsoleted messengers

in the land of the braves,

and every path is concrete

for metal turtle shells to roll along

on black wheels.  

In the dead trees’ silent conversation

whole worlds live leaping

throughout the wires.

But no one can touch

the Internet, the invisible web spidering together every corner of the world,

trapping infinite words like bugs.  Some

to be tasted.  Some

to be swallowed. Some 

few to be chewed, 

chewed and digested.

The rest left imprisoned

in unbegun moments.

There Are None Left Over For Sentencing

The caterpillar laughs, lying

on a mushroom, cloud

of smoke streaming from his mouth

at the end of the world.

He’s laughing.  When He explodes

He’ll be a butterfly.

What About Us?

When everything has wound down 

and the stars have all burned out, 

so that you can’t even 

hold a conversation with them anymore, 

like Icarus 

they rose 

too high too far did too many

drugs too many times 

and now

they’ve come to this sitting

like vegetables at the end

of time, and no God steps

out of shadows, laying hands

on them to heal them; no peace

swallows them like diamonds

sleeping in a cave; no rest

for stars, just that endless oasis

without water in the eternity

of nothing night that fills the gaps between exhausted sparks and everything ends:

what about us?

We Look Out from the Window

feeling nothing of it.

It is winter.  Snow 

is on the ground and I

can’t even feel the glass.

Not when I watch Mother Mary weep.  

I can’t feel the roof 

when the sky is raining

blood.  Forty days

forty nights.  It’s all the same, 

beneath the Bodhi tree.  

It’s all the same.  

An ark, a covenant, a basket.  

It’s all the same 

to the executioner.

He doesn’t even look.

He Doesn’t Even Look

The Lamb pulled the wool

over every eye when they killed Him.  

They didn’t know that He wanted to die.  Man

didn’t know that He wanted 

to be cooked

in the sun and stabbed

in the gut.  He wanted

that crown they gave Him.

He wanted to serve. To live

is to suffer.  And who doesn’t

want to live?

We See Buddha Standing

on the mountain 

in the cold above the rain,  

miracles springing up around him,

drawing every god and devil to gaze

blank around his wisdom and bow 

as understanding flows from tongue

to ground in a blessed eternal moment

that constantly keeps growing

with the vibrations of his words.

He could not have

known himself,

but only dealt with it,

if not for the prophecies

surrounding him at birth,

causing his childhood seclusion

in that palace 

with delights for walls, 

where still he suffered. 

Escaping them he found

the four directions were

birth, old age, sickness, death.

Dharma was the center,

the only virtue with no opposite,

no reverse.  There’s no escaping

those four noble truths.  

They are the mountain. 

They are the rain.

Fold the Path

Every footstep is foreshadowed

by the one that came before

on a board of little pieces

in every shade of glass.

If only you could find

some way to change

them and make them

let you go.  Could stand

above the ground so that you 

don’t cast the shadow 

that rules over your life.

If you could only see it

in a clear round crystal

And enter it.  And follow it 

straight through the floor 

and use it as a door 

to a surface free of dust, 

knicking past the walls 

of the cave that surrounds 

our lives and bodies, to a place 

beyond objective names 

where the dead grass stains 

of time’s passage

no longer remain.

Caesar Took His Life

Caesar took his life in his hands

when he put on Alexander’s boots

and though he wore them longer

they never did quite fit

quite right.  They gave him

these awful blisters the historians

don’t like to talk about.

The historians don’t like to talk

about the thousand feet

that walked this ground

and have faded from our view,

those rippling crowds sucked

into the wake of the Republic.

The Republic

It is in Plato’s Cave that the blind

lead the blind through empty 

echoing halls bereft, empty

halls, empty of steady light.

The flames dance on the walls

but no one sees their shadows.

Instead they play at industry,

mass producing crowns.

They fashion golden crowns

as they march to embellish the head 

of the column so that they do not lose the way

as they follow blind behind, excreting everything

and despairing at the scent of fresh air because

the spiteful sun would burn their sightless eyes.

In Plato’s Cave the invisible walls bring people

together, clasping hands and calling out 

when alone.  And families flock 

in the wake of the ever changing

forward guard, bound like rope woven

together through sympathy and fear.

Lovers press together, embracing

one another because the surest

light that they can see lies

in the sparks of kindred

spirits meeting.  All are trailing

blind behind as wise men take

the lead, eternally striving ever

to progress through the dark.

Confidently striding through

the murk and with no gauge

for triumph but longevity.

Durability.  Success.   

One compass traded

between them with the hope

to guess at fate as it is passed down

the line it reads,

“In the Land of the Blind

the one-eyed man is mad.”

In Cleveland

We read of Caesar

of the Pillars of Hercules

of how hard things are to move.

We don’t see the shadows

of the ships that pass between.

We know nothing of their mermaids

and their storms.  I want to shake

the hand of the Great Leviathan

who swallows everything.

Even the memory of my birth.

King and Captain

My brother says Leonard Cohen

is too depressing.  He plays happier

tunes on his guitar when he can

get his wife to let him.

He was my keeper for a while

and my parents claim he raised me.

I say he was a poor fit in both functions.

His pride made him take the lead.

His shame kept him from choosing

a direction.  He’s the captain

of the Flying Dutchman who

plays fiddle in the crow’s nest,

barking orders too high up 

to be taken clearly and too garbled

for even him to know if he speaks

anything but gibberish.  Still he’s loud 

enough to be heard above both the calm 

and the storm.  Still each syllable carries 

the bluster of command and the gust from 

his lungs, from his flapping lips, the babble 

is strong enough to fill the sails and hot 

enough so that the boat floats above the waves. 

He’s the engine of his misery, a martyr

who won’t die.  His destination is vague

and pretty as an overcast sky.  He’ll pass

through Hell smiling for spite and in Heaven,

he’ll sneer without knowing it.  A born leader.

Leonard Cohen is too depressing for him 

but then the man can drive a stone 

to tears without so much 

as a note of blame.

He’s Just a Dream on a Page

When I swim the Rubicon

Paulyander rides my shoulder

whispering words from works

I wish I read, “Beware the flies

and marsh.  They will give you

Malaria.  And if you do not

have sickled cells you’re bound

for bouts with harsh hysteria.”

I show him Yorick’s skull.

He flies shrieking from the river.

He doesn’t understand a thing.

Death is never real.

We all live on in books, 

I scream to the nothing of the night 

and in the city of the Angels I look 

to find God’s light, but God

is dead, the German said.  I like

to think he’s napping.  But how

can anybody tell?  Can’t peak

your head through the womb

and if you did what’d you see?

We could all just be His dream.

Then if He wakes we disappear.

He can only write so much

in that journal He keeps by

His bed before it all fades

away, completely lost. Nothing

to write down, no way

to write it.  What He can keep is

history.  The rest of us are dead.

If those who don’t exist can die.

We Could All Be His Dream

Lincoln freed the slaves, Hell, he freed the nation.  

By conquering the Confederation, founded on states’

self-determination, he brought about emancipation 

and the tyranny of liberation.  Now self-government

is the condensation on selected books of education, replaced in reality by unlawful taxation, unfamiliar

representation, central bank controlled inflation and 

prescription medication mandated over contemplation..

Lincoln freed the slaves but could he do the same for us?

Maybe, if he hired John Henry to pound away

at our chains.  Henry’d put his heart and soul in it

but in the end both would have to break, and then

the robots would take over and we’d spend our lives

just reading about them while machines did all the work.

They’d build our houses and our streets. They’d tell us

when to walk and when to not.  They’d solve

our mysteries.  They’d write our histories.

They’d play our music for us.

The Illumination Company Band

would be put out of a job.  Krishna

would set down his flute.  Buddha

would make a basket of his drum

Jesus would uncross His fiddle

and Midas would stop singing.

The Prophet would have nothing

left for his camera to film.  They’d

all just be standing there forever

silent when they used to play

the rhythm and the blues

to anyone who cared

to listen.

Whenever I Wake Up

I drag my self from my bed

with a world etched in dreams

still orbiting my head.

I have to play detective 

just to find out who I am.  

The paintings on my wall 

my brother did of Orpheus 

passing through the the gates

of Hell with Tantalus and Icarus

at his back and the one of his lyre

with Atlas standing over it holding

polygons above his head hardly

even pass as evidence.

Hamlet tells us Fortune 

is a harlot.  That’s another word 

for whore.  Anyway that answers 

nothing, but, if true, it follows that Fate 

must be a shrew and somehow

the two of them are holding

hands as they go strolling streets

each day where Fortune lies

with everyone as Fate

wears their wedding bands.

Shakespeare Buried Hamnet

I’ve heard that shovels that part

the Earth for the caskets of our children

are the hardest to hold.  They are made

of lead and gold.  Too heavy for the ground, 

they bathe in blood and bone.  

My grandfather used a rusting rifle 

to chase the devils from the graves 

of his forefathers when freedom 

was defeated in the steppes of World War II.

The Twisted Cross, the Hammered

Sickle, they hounded the tall grass

of his home.  He and his brothers fought

as the great red bear came batting down

his door, saying his porridge was the property

of the State.  Through frosted nights,

empty skies and the ant-hill prisons

of his enemies, he fought.  As the Jews

were burning in the West and in Jerusalem

returning, in an unseen patriotic army

he fought for the land that was his home.

Fascists?  Communists?  Militarists

are rapists with ideals instead of sperm.

First the Nazis then the Commies came,

following the same orders in different uniforms.

Dust guerrillas, the insurgents misted 

and were spent in missions with no hope 

of help or victory they fought and won and ran.  

They clung to the Earth where their blood was planted

before Noah left his ark.  From camp to camp

Dido flowed like a river with no bed.  Through

Galicia where his father’s family fished in what

has been Poland since before the Holodomor

to Austria and Germany in the carcass

of the war that ended war he drifted.  Until

finally he came to be sitting on the steps

in Philadelphia.  He sits there in what

I imagine was a pinstripe suit and a Bogart 

hat with not a word in his mouth.  

Not a possession to his name. 

He washes dishes for sixty hours, 

sixty hours, sixty hours 

every week for less than I make 

in half a day if I call in sick.  

He works, he eats, he sleeps until time

pulls him to Babunya, the old

woman who held me when I was happy

as a naked baby.  She was younger then than

I am now.  Time sails him to here where

he has retired from servicing machines and now,

now his hair has retreated from his scalp, his

wrinkles have annexed his face, and his knees

have surrendered their cartilage.  But he lets me

live upstairs from him for nothing

in exchange, and he pays me to drive 

him anywhere he wants to go, usually

the grocery store or bank, and all 

he asks of me is that I be

careful in everything I do.

He buried his son too, 

and you’ll never know his name.

Into the Mirror

Every morning I drag

myself to the bathroom

where the mirror is.  And

every morning it lies to me.

It tells me there is nothing 

I can know it cannot show 

the world.  I shave the whiskers

from my face and find I’m not a lion 

as in my head I am digging 

through a pile of lies for the string 

that holds the Truth.  And it pricks 

holes into my brain’s fingers

as I grasp like a blind man 

through the needles I perceive.

I finally get my shoes on 

and it occurs to me I don’t need

to remember my name or my face 

they’re right here with me 

at the only place I cannot see 

except in the mirror where everything

is reversed and every morning it lies

to me repeating that damned curse it says,  

“Remember Yuriy, there’s nothing 

to you I cannot see.  There’s nothing

I can’t show the world. There never will be.”

The Metaphysical Court

Saint Peter is still assembling

the Metaphysical Court to examine

the case of my dead uncle

and the forced starvation 

of Ukraine.

They’ve got a lot of dead

to sort through.  You see, 

there’s no Time where They are 

from and an infinite shortage

of names and faces.  They went

and combined my uncle with Ukraine

and confused the two with Hamnet.

One was Shakespeare’s son and the other

was something outside tragedy, but to Them 

they are one and the same.

They still haven’t reached

anything approaching

a verdict. Their word

for victim and suspect is pretty

much the same and They have

no mode of memory.

And so I know my history

the only way I can,

as my parrot knows the world

past the window, standing feathered

in his cage, as a soul caught 

in a blizzard, eternal in the snow 

knows what it is to burn.