Reprise

Crazy Horse Lost in the Backrooms: Intermezzo, Transmissions from the Roving City

Crazy Horse Lost in the Backrooms: Intermezzo, Transmissions from the Roving City

Originally Published 13 September 2023

There come to Horse on whispered ether-wire
the nauka ghosts’ bespoke transmissions,
their last scribed words unspooling ragged
across the plasmic dark, their coos and caws,

the static-split Broditgrad eulogy
for the science city gone astray from history. 

The metropolis flames, horizon-dashed,
aglimm’ring everywhere at once and nowhere,
the Cathedral Episteme, where Stalin looms still,
and watches quiet buildings’ ribs go thin.  

Pale-peopled memories haunt concrete stoops
between now and then and tomorrow, cloister 

burning green drums with outstretched hands
to talk about weather that can be all things at once
and none, cloudy and clear, and what kind eyes
on Josef, how jolly-deep his crow’s feet. 

Then Crazy Horse remembers another sad people,
other sad fires, stories tangled in quantum knots
unraveling to a million tragic ends, and to none.