Art

Россия – Kai Edward Warmoth

Here come the czarists. 

Reach into your parsonical lessons and remember!

Always the sweeping phantom, they have been.

Surely your mother will recall, your grandma too,

How this Red Demiurge has always lurched amongst men.

 

Look here; don’t you see?

Lyudmila puts her crosshairs to the modem:

“LadyDeath16 liked” how gullible you can be.

Better dead than to click the heart red.

Better to stain the sand with blood of our working poor 

Rather than soil it with that Anastasia cruor.

 

These cossacks, ah, they want to load our hands

With munitions; imagine a million men! 

With a million rifles, 

                     from untraceable plastic Chinese lands, 

Possibly even a billion!

Right where the children can reach them;

Children grown corpulent from our own 

Soybeans & corn 

                      (from the field out back we had grown)

From which the Ruskies’ had probably sown. 

 

Have you seen him on the corner pushing boy?

Don’t let the minstrel masks fool you;

They hide their rancor under a victim veil.

’Tis Uncle Seva, come to put H in the arms 

Of the touchscreen kids, but 

                                                              We have our own

Needles and we steal them back from God

Only to have them sweating and muttering,

“Я ни фига не вижу, no,

                                                        I don’t see a thing.”

 

They wish to topple our pantheon of Host-Judges

And snip at their reigns on the useful coterie,

To insert some Pagan Christ King who tries

To sell me forgiveness for free.

                                                   Seeking the protokletos:

Their apostolate walks amongst gauche Appalachia 

Kneecap, humerus, three fingers and a tooth:

Mountain Dew holy water, collapsing roof.

A new White Army or a suboxone dose?

O, they’ve stricken our pharisees with agraphia! 

 

What rats evaded the purification of Kronstadt?

Across an ocean, they’ve infested our home!

And chew against the bars of cells and tombs

Disregarding the legion courtrooms’

Shrewd efforts to stem the reactionary tide

(as in, whosoever won’t bow to Our Side).

 

Surely Drago reclines in Oval Office, 

                                                  Chasing his Popov with power.

& Varangians relieve the Secret Service on the hour,

We know that they’re there, so sayeth our prophets.

 

I pass Julius Rosenberg on the brick of Penn Avenue;

His face, his words, his cultural mythology too

Seems so familiar but I will not be deceived.

My countryman? No! He is nothing like me.

Neighbor or nothing, I know what I’m taught.

Compatriot? No! Just another Russian plot!