Kyiv – the champion!

Kyiv – the champion!

The clouds crawl like burning ice floes

the streets are brimming with gold and wind

doors rattle neons tremble

frost bitumen anxiety

ladies are sharp like silver strings

they take trolleys they flag taxis

the sun is setting and its angle of incidence

is somewhat like a B flat note

bohunks in the sub are croaking predictions

led by a full fed elephant

deerskins coats phonemes phonemes

cracked and coarse like moonshine

and my teeth are like a r-r-r-radiator

phonemes stick the portraits of stars

thirty-years-old queens like a chapeau claque

deflate to the size of unhappy women

but the smile is needless the sun is buried

a cripple stumbles across a lonely square

throws up his head and watches

light raging in the hundred thousandth cup

young and deceived with a baby in her arms

returns to her mother to Stary Oskol

a fiery explosion wakes the baby

a hundred thousand voices in one ‘goal’

a hundred thousand happies on the street

fall in cafes fall flowing into the sub

and black cuts the city in twain

unable to freeze groans the Dnipro.

In winter in the night

something wakes me up

something holds me by the throat

I cannot breathe

I hate walls

I walk along naked dark streets

I look for the sun

my frozen lips try to remember something

a song or a name

there is no name to that

there is no way out

it’s Kyiv

perhaps my friends are not asleep

it’s Kyiv thank Heaven.

I ease off at Podil.

I’m sorry. I feel,

by Heavens, much better now.