Pentimento

remembering Radio Yerevan

Radio Yerevan tells us that we can save the world
– you, me and everybody
sitting bare-arsed on a hedgehog:
you either shave the hedgehog before sitting,
substitute someone else’s arse.
or follow a directive of the Party.

So I saved the world. Yes, me.
It wasn’t easy
as humanity dragged us to buggery,
right on the edge of our
festering demise.

I pricked its arse clear of muck,
two minutes before cosmic midnight
with a fat hedgehog.
Imagine that!

This was not salvation sensu stricto.
I am not God.
I don’t love the world THAT much,

just got it out if its bother,
its pressing messiness.
A momentary delay.
No one noticed anything.

Except the hedgehog.

In the morning Radio Yerevan announces
that all remaining hedgehogs – of all things!
must report to the Red Army Choir.

My wife scolds me:
Why do you keep doing this?
Why all this thankless effort?
You’ve tried so many times
and you just screw it up!
You are so naïve
to believe this planet can be saved
by you and a hedgehog!
Leave them the fuck alone.
The world and that poor hedgehog…
He’ll be happier singing in the Red Army Choir
And you only have a tin ear.
Yeah, yeah, I say.
Yeah, yeah, she says.

#Metoo for severed bodies

Oh my God, what’s the matter with so many virus experts?
I’d request them to be shortened by the skin of their false teeth.

For the virused, on the highways, were detestably deleted
with the filthy naked figure of their bodies cut beneath.

If my leering eyes would wonder, I could visualise those breasts
for their cadaver looks stunning and doesn’t even bleed.

But the multitudes will question: WTF, am I a pervert?
were the media to examine my opinion or my deed?

Melody, unzip my jodhpurs – ring those bells to circumcision
though I might be sent to prison like delinquents who offend.

I, like them, excrete discreetly, but with uttermost derision,
on “community’s high standards” and the values they pretend.

I seek foolishly a hashtag, the #MeToo for severed bodies…
I find none, and that’s annoying, for I always hear the ref,

or an expert on the matter – any cretin who embodies
some authority – to holler instructions till you are deaf.

my letters

I sent you hundreds of letters, all open –
so that they could be read
or so I wished –
by the driver who empties the post-box,
or by the bespectacled woman who does the sorting,
and, who knows…
even by the poor postman
who pushes your correspondence, hurriedly,
through the slit of your letter box.
Maybe one of these days,
when he’s not so busy, when he’s bored,
he might read one of those letters.
Then he might not rush home, fight with his cheating partner,
cook some dinner, drink a beer, and watch Netflix.
Maybe he would gaze, for a moment,
towards your window, imagining who might live there.
But perhaps he might just lose concentration, crash his
yellow scooter over the barrier at the end of your street
and end up in hospital. Or dead.

Mona Lisa

Just give me your hand, Mona Lisa, and flee,
leave mouldy museums to quibble and moan –
the world waits outside, made of flesh and of bone,
with rain and with sunshine, with mountains and sea.

For hundreds of years you have hung on this wall,
in hope Leonardo will somehow appear –
while loafers and fools gave you praises or smear
and packed like sardines, they remained in your thrall.

Your gaze speaks a playful or insolent tale –
as thousands of critics are wont to explain –
but what matter words, be they wise or mundane,
when up on this wall hangs your heart, by a nail?

I’ll wait till the evening at the pub down the lane
that is crowded with people made of flesh and of bone,
leave stuffy old Louvres to quibble and moan
and we’ll dance in the sunshine and run in the rain.