8/3 0000

oh-dark thirty as the army puts it

headache from the hour
not midnight but twentyfive and confused
so trite it ought to be stated so a dog
can piss on it and another dog eat it
and then it's gone, finally

i mean this head pain, what you
want to call it, staggering cigarette no-dinner
mongo uplate fuckin headache -
a lease is up in thirty days fuckin headache
and no degree from a sick corrupt dangerous
and dishonest system headache -
a mathematician's headache when she
isn't doing math -
a poet's headache when she's rushing and bursting
with thoughts -
a woman's headache hey don't all bloody
twats get fuckin headaches -
a person's headache   it's all in the stupid
head of yours

i mean my headache
...................................................................

so I went and looked up shto vot
rather than ask any more people
who don't speak any Russian
i mean i can send email to people i know
who do speak Russian
because the phrase is not, if i am spelling it
correctly in the Cyrillic alphabet, in standard dictionaries
or nonstandard idiomatic phrasebooks
although perhaps it is and i could not find it
i looked it up and after a while and several books
came to several separate sequential conclusions
all related hanging together swirling in the
ludicrous pathos between two trapped people
i mean i just can't send such an email
i would not and do not know how to begin it
shto vot: who's here? who's there?

perhaps in a sense it really does
more or less
mean: I am rolling over and going back to sleep because my
groggy wakefulness is quickly being replaced by a sleepiness untroubled
by whatever recent bad dream
(I slept in that bed last night and woke with no idea
where I was)
mean: Who is calling me?  Where am I?
mean:  Who do you think is here?
mean :  Who did you think was sleeping next to you?

but to me now it sounds like

Despite your proximity I am alone
Tell me about yourself
Lie there two feet from me and breathe similar air
Wake up when I have dreams in the night which
        Induce me to twitch and mutter and moan
Teach me the inner language of you for you
So when I speak to you I know we understand it
Who's here?  Who am I in this with?  I'm in something,
it's a friend's bed where?  Whose bed?  A friend's?  Who's
there?  A clue, I'm awaking groggy with no fcking clue,
no fsucking clue -

whose words in this now, fsucking is another
army brat word
an army con word from a Vietnam vet's son
Alec is a military brat too

relevantly, perhaps, a son
of a different army

to wit, the army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

saw a painting today, Russian Impressionist's work,
a reproduction in a book in the library where i work
although i don't paint there
and in this painting the Russian military man
sat poised with such ineffable grace
like Alec on the rickety back porch of this second-floor apartment

i could have yelled and hit my head in fury
the understanding ran so high

instead i kept flipping through the book
and then shelved it
and now I have a headache

--------------------------------------------
8/3 ~1230

shit on a shingle
breakfast, did I eat
six Parliaments
and the corner of a Pop-Tart
eightthirty at-work other library
Koyaanisqatsi
Powaqatsi
Koyaanisqatsi:  a way of life which calls for another way of living
Powaqatsi:  a life which must devour other lives in order to live

isolated translations of these reverberating out-of-context words
shto vot

six Parliaments for breakfast.  in the belly of the beast
they're dissolving.  I ate them,
MPs military police that hilarious metaphor in Philip Roth
about the creativewriting teacher as ex-military man

the sense that only militant discipline can pound the art in deep enough
so ninetyeightpointsix percent of the time it does NOT
"Seem
like artifice"

i mean i didn't chew the smokes, i smoked them.
so the Parliaments have disappeared
their residue in my lungs
breathing out with each word i utter
each utter word each word of utter speech each
word of utter (hand gesture)

breathing among the residue of giants, their shoulders
long underground, breath and ideas
swirling like the unnecessary pathos
between two people, snagging like
nails not beaten
far enough into a board

flush, beat the nails til they're
flush with the board.

no more I love yous/ language is leaving me
sings Annie Lennox.
instead we have
what's for breakfast
and shto vot.