Tsaritsyno in Autumn

Who will tell of the architect’s tears?
Poor Bazhenov, the desired child born under an ill star, all his grand endeavours lost, ruined or destroyed.
I trudge through rain and mud, past stray dogs fucking, over the fairytale bridge, into the empress’s cancelled dream.
In this city of crooked walls and girls whose bums I’d like to bite, what fears and fancies are already taking revenge on me?
Certain conundrums trouble me in the small hours of the mind…effects without apparent causes…(I found a dead fly in the corner of my room last night, but never have I actually seen one die).
I know that I was born one day, one ordinary day, long ago, in a place far away, and that is all I know, or all I will admit to. The rest, of course, is theory and conjecture.
They say that all of Russian literature comes out of Gogol’s overcoat. Well, all of English literature comes out of my left trouser pocket.
I recite the names of demons, half-hoping for a visitation: Belphegor, Leviathan, Tenebrion, Arachula. Faculties, virtues, powers and spirits-all my being suffers silent changes.
Moscow, hunchbacked courier of sorrows! The skyline’s pouting frown adjusts my soul. I feel I am waiting- but for what?
And something will come-but not that. Something will happen-but not that.
My soul shrinks back, mourning lives unlived.
What has beauty loaned me for an hour? The knowledge of a smile. The Ark.
Once, once I believed, or thought I believed, in stars and wonders, in ineffable splendours …until the spider stole over me in the night.
The night gone, and the day gone, and what remains?
The stranger speaks with my mouth, gestures with my hands. What he is here for, no-one knows or dares say.
A killing kindness lives in love, a paper crown you place upon my head. And who are you to inaugurate reigns and invoke the holy auspices? Well, God, of course, the God of broken things.
Must every tale contain a moral? Is every skull a sign of death?
I loiter on a stray moment’s corner, offering myself for hire, waiting for someone to pay me for doing nothing…and then my destiny will be complete, my folly vindicated.
Scholars fash and fret over the origins of Russian roulette…but I know where the game was invented…right here in a backroom of my mind.
Another entertainment-and I know I won’t be satisfied for long-another world to conquer and destroy, and then a little song.
Life will be the death of me.
And still the Golden Fleece has not been found. Pray, read, work and discover.