Listen! If the stars are lit up in the night,
does it mean that somebody wants them to be?
I marched through the streets like a factory light,

A giant!
        A furnace!
    A roaring decree!

I threw my yellow coat in the face of the czar,
And spat on the sonnets of old.
I stepped on the throat of my own vocal star,
To forge the new world in the mold.

I was the trumpet for Soviet dawn,
A massive,
    megaphoned,
        iron-clad tongue!
The old world was dead, and its curtains were drawn,
While I sang the hymns that the workers had swung.
I wrote for the billboards, I wrote for the press,
A layout of slogans like lead.
But under the leather and communist dress,
A self-devouring fire
    was burning instead.

× × ×

Then into the chaos, the thunder, the smoke,
Stepped Lilya.
    The woman.
        The ultimate yoke.
She took my trembling heart
like an old dirty rag,
And wrung it right out
till it all bled.
She wore her dynamic, bohemian tag,
While keeping her husband in bed!
A three-cornered romance that tortured the brain,
A cage made of silk and of nails.
I yelled her bright name through the winter and rain,
Like an engine that’s jumped from the rails.

“I don’t need your passion! I don’t need your state!”
I screamed to her window on high.
But Lilya was master of the mystery fate,
The sun in my hazardous sky.
She loved my big poems, but locked up the key,
And left me to burn in the yard.
No party, no council, no red decree
Could save the grand soul of the bard.

× × ×

The twenties were fading. The bureaucrats grew.
The system was choking the song.
The hands were all shown.
The critics all knew
That the giant had stayed for too long.
They mocked my new plays, they restricted my flight,
The comrade was losing his grip.
With an open visor, I stood in the night,
Refusing to abandon the ship.

× × ×

On the fourteenth of April, the century crashed.
    A bedroom.
        A pistol.
The end of the track.
The love-boat of life on the shallows was smashed,
And the red curtain tumbled to black.

I left a last note for the country to read:
I shot a clean bullet right into my chest—
“Don’t blame anyone for my lead.”
The drummer had gone to his rest.

× × ×

A monument made of the silver and steel,
A rhythm that steps like a boot.
I gave to the gutter a lyrical feel,
And blew out my brains for the root.

The typewriter’s quiet,
        the slogans are done,
For my verse is a shot at the sun!