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