Memory Eternal
(For Oksana who died for Mariupol)
Як умру, то поховайте “When I die, then bury me
Мене на могилі, On a rolling plain.
Серед степу широкого, Raise my barrow in the soil
На Вкраїні милій, Of my dear Ukraine”
— Taras Shevchenko “Testament”
In Moscow when I was a kid, mom would
drag us to ballet shows I didn’t know
I liked. One night a Swan Lake dancer stood
and caged her weight into a single toe,
birding her arms out, floating on baroque
cascades of grace, her torso dancing by
the floor’s invisible moves, till like bombsmoke
eating the stars out of a clear black sky
gravity got her and she nearly fell
that summer in ’96 as if to spell
my lesson: the abyss gapes up the dress
of a good thing when it takes toe-point art
like ballet, rule of law or a free press.
Today, it sings like bullets in my heart.
When shells began dismembering Mariupol
I who had just tried on a pair of shoes
puked from a gut in flames, each shred of scruple
in me lit like a Molotov’s rag fuse
that I knew where to hurl as if betrayal
that burned me were not fireproof filth. As if
to run into a Sleeping Beauty tale
and tell the prince that girl is dead and stiff,
the Bucha bodies came. A bone trireme
rammed the brain and boarded all belief.
The Russia of my memory lay remiss
in me. It is an axed tree’s crinkling leaf.
A stillborn child’s smile. An exquisite dream
of vodka poured out into a cask of piss.
Bury the Russia of my memory
beside Shevchenko’s barrow in Ukraine
where I can visit only after we
have counted all the bodies over again.
Bury my bones in Kyiv if it’s still free.
Bury my brain in murdered Soledar.
Bury my ears with Franko’s poetry.
Bury my guts beside a Bayraktar.
Bury my eyes in Bucha. Let them weep.
Bury my tongue in Bakhmut. Let it lash.
Nothing of me in Petersburg will sleep.
Nothing in Moscow, Omsk or Izberbash.
Bury my heart in Mariupol, deep
in Azovstal
in sweat and steel and ash.
Stream of Jokerfication
“Goodbye shiz and so long game”
— Red Hot Chili Peppers
I am not born to write like this
but the old jazz now smacks of piss.
So I will sing what can be swung
from this defiled, gagging tongue.
Once more now in the daymare dark
old dogs of the late twenties bark.
Drop your op-ed and dankest Tweet
like flaccid swords at Caesar’s feet
as comfortable Europe shrinks
to ancient phobia and thinks
like coping Romans at the baths
who knew their gods were psychopaths.
Let the disgrace of sanity
stare lidless from the human eye
at hot and rising sea that bogs
the heart and boils proverbial frogs.
Let our TikTok’d attention span
stretch round the fact that endings can
come. No, not with a bang or whimper
but with a cringe and stupid simper.
When a republic slits its veins
can madness make the heart grow brains
until the healing rivers wind
through deserts of the public mind?
I know some of us so obtuse
they still have innocence to lose
just want back cocaine of Back Then:
“Make Politics a Bore Again.”
Learn to mourn what was really done,
and that Democracy is not won
through hollow suits that helped contrive its
kicking the public in the privates.
Or else Dame Liberty, that drunk hag
fiddling with an old forty-mag,
can quit deepthroating her own gun.
Just pull the trigger and be done.
In wreckage I will anvil verse
like gorgets pounded from a curse.
I am not born to write like this.
You should avoid a man who is.
Click here to read A. Z. Foreman on the origin of the poems.
Image by Gene Auber on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Two Poems: Memory Eternal and Stream of Jokerfication - December 25, 2025