Michail goes,
the radio blurts,
and I'm caught off guard,
unprepared
for the tears that well up,
the jumbled words,
the sudden loneliness
that forces me
to stop dead in my breath,
trying to hold on to sanity
and reason
and collect myself, struggling
to understand what my body knows
before me,
feeling ridiculous
behind my blurred vision,
hiding myself from Anna downstairs,
the radio continuing its reports
of old hope and new despair,
as I begin to catch up with my body,
step by step recalling Glasnost
and Perestroika
and the human touch
out of Mordor;
the glimmer of hope
where there was no hope;
the quest for humanity and civil rights
where there'd been none;
the sudden eruption of hope
in the mid 1980s,
now since long dispersed
and trampled on,
disintegrated, killed and consumed
in the scorpio guise
of Vladimir P,
repulsive
at the tip of my death wish