| General Poetry
posted December 5, 2023 |
The truth waiting in the secret archives.
How does one live crushed under a giant boot?
Simple, my friend—you just wear it like a suit.
Let the weight settle over you like a mantle.
Stand in line for bread or cigs like it’s a game,
forget the Lenin on the wall, and that other one,
Comrade What’s-His-Name. On the tram minutes
move like an inspector’s fingers drumming
on a desk. You think about scrawling some graffiti,
then think about the risk. Instead you go trawling
for knockoff denims and underground cassettes,
and wonder what is worse: when the phone rings
at night with only hissing silence on the end,
or picking up, and thinking, for a moment,
you hear the muffled voice of a friend?
At night you feel the silence watching you,
hear the dogs filing their reports.
Then, it seems as if by magic, everything is over.
The grey world injected technicolor (or so people
act). Folks in the squares rejoice; t.v. heads
trade concerned looks. The streets are soon repaved
with tossed-out Marxist books.
One thing capitalism does not bring: an end to lines.
(Or to lies. In both cases, the difference is:
at the end, you still expect to get a prize.)
Lines at McDonald’s, with families in Sunday best;
lines to sort out properties, the ones the state divests.
There is a line, too, for the truth. It waits,
muzzled in document boxes, in the archives.
It’s a form of torture—the bureaucracy
of despair, filing the necessary papers
to learn the secrets of your life.
Does one really wish to know the ways
the state outfoxes all, the moral failings
of your neighbors or misdeeds of their wives?
But the whispers from the papers scratch
at the temples like a dog wanting in from the cold.
So you sit at the desk, like ones you’ve seen before,
open the folder—and eyes spill out, so many eyes.
Brown ones, blues, green, so many. The eyes of neighbors,
teachers, co-workers, cousins and uncles…friends.
You recognize them all. Even those of that odd
kid met in Komsomol. They gather on the floor
around your ankles as they fall, open wide, boring
into you. Some you expected, even greet with a nod.
Others lack the decency to look away in shame.
And then there is the pair, the only one to move,
looking everywhere: and blame gets choked
down like bile—you recognize them
as your own, and suddenly, you’re blind.
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Free Verse writing prompt entry
One of the most difficult aspects of the transition from communism to post-socialism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries was learning the extent to which the surveillance state had penetrated their lives, and the widespread web of complicity--including recognizing one's own.
The Komsomol was the Communist Party's youth league.
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