So let’s comPuniCage!
It’s neat
For you can have your seat
In your nameless city
And I can in mine
Grab the keyboard, hit it!
Sorry, my e-friend, I didn’t know
That you by this time have grown so old
I haven’t logged out for twenty-five years
I’ve always been near, e-near.
But then again…
Why meet
If you can get old in your place
And I can in mine
And still get old, get old, get old
Non-e-old…
Undo! Undo! Undo the changes!
If in a place of many
You don’t have a penny
The many around you won’t probably help:
Life ain’t so sunny
Where everyone’s running
For nothing but money.
It cannot be helped.
Deep, very deep in the taiga forest
Where the beautiful fir-tree grows
A squat plain log-built loner’s cottage
Stands in the thick of the grove.
The ski-path meandering endlessly through
The realm of the evergreen muffled with snow
Brings me to the hut not really soon —
I’ve come here to spend time alone.
Cold and tired but happy and hopeful
I stoke up the oven and unpack the victuals.
The sky is starry, the flame is joyful,
Life seems so suddenly simple.
Don’t talk to me
The way the talk should be,
Talk to me free,
Don’t sing to me,
For all I want from thee
Is just sincerity.
So don’t talk to me
Like they talk on TV,
Don’t quarrel with me
Like they do in the movies,
But do it sincerely,
Do it upfront,
Do it so thoroughly
I am right away stunned;
Don’t do it right,
But do it your way,
Do it at night
And during the day.
Don’t talk to me
The way the talk should be,
Talk to me free.
Hometown-bound
A long steel rail
That we all have seen
With its maddening steadiness
And its lamp-side sheen
Carries on carrying us
To the places we’ve been
Helping to go back
To the pasts long gone…
Some nice, some lived irreversibly wrong.
People who live there
Live on in our past
Which seems to be bound
To always last.
The subject can be narrow or broad:
It ranges from ‘lapel’ to ‘Lord’,
It may be quite a panorama
But here’s today’s communication drama:
It’s never deep however broad:
We listen but we soon get bored.
Recurring to computers, TV, books,
Indulging in embellishing our looks,
We shallower soon become,
To coreless, flashy life succumbed.
Russia-Bound
When Russia was said to have been sold
I wasn’t sold on that:
The heart of this country is inert to gold,
The song is infinitely sad.
One hundred yards they sleep underneath
The stormy chest of the Barents Sea
In an iron, iron black submarine
Day after day into eternity…
Penned captain-lieutenant, ‘We’re twenty-three’…
…‘we’ll be twenty-three and here we’ll be’…
I will see a whole world
But everywhere I go
I will see the sky above
Now high and now low
I will breathe the air
Everywhere I go
I will be myself
Whatever I may know.
That’s Russia
You will never translate it into your own language
So let me talk to you in your own tongue.
I’ve been living here for many a year
Couldn’t help looking here at many a thing
Seen many a foreigner in and to this country
Foreigners by passport and foreigners convinced
Strangers changing attitudes by seconds
Strangers largely to themselves
Many a madman have I seen too
Many who died to know what to do
Many a bright head locked in a madhouse
Many a sage man, many obtuse
Many a small man saying Russia is great
Many in love with it, many in hate
Many who added they can’t understand it
Many explaining: ‘Russia’s just vast’
Some say that Russia has always been still
Others remark it has always been ill;
Many believe it’s a land of confusion
Many assert it is all an illusion
Historians say that Russia