"Be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent
And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound."
Marina Tsvetaeva
The basement in my head is
flooded—
TV rooms are
floating
Through my subconscious
crawlspace;
I have purified the rats—
Can't you see I'm
healing?
"Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind?"
Marina Tsvetaeva
Forget the astral
histrionics,
The constellations on the corner,
Loitering in space,
Throwing aster-oids upon the earth
from the interstellar
overpass;
They will not be counted guiltless
who flaunt their hand-me-down
power
In the face of the creator;
the scoundrels will be held accountable
for the virtue in their
crimes
"I refuse to—be. In
the madhouse of the inhumans
I refuse to—live. To swim
on the current of human spines."
Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva,
did you know
that in the pre-post-present
psychedelic lexicon,
the Bolsheviks prance around
in blueface, though their
tactics
are the same?
Marina Tsvetaeva, did you know that according to Pablopedia, "The Blue Meanies are the main antagonists in the Immigrant Insurrection of 2025. They are a fictional army of disagreeable beings that abhor all music.
In the surreal universe of Yellow Submarine, Los Malditos Azules attempt to silence and occupy Los Angeles, an underwater utopia filled with color and music.
Los Malditos Azules launch an attack on The United States, a paradise where music and peace reign, in an attempt to crush its spirit."
Marina Tsvetaeva, did the Meanies crush your spirit?
Did they let you take a bath before you
hung your
body like a blanket out to
dry?
Did you know that they're not fictional?
Did they eat you with their fingers?
Did they immortalize your story
with an histrionic
sigh?
"Fair enough: you people have eaten me,
I—wrote you down.
They’ll lay you out on a dinner table,
me—on this desk."
Marina Tsvetaeva
The word buffet is wasted
Nuance and flavor are royalist
constructions, bourgeois
Sedatives employed upon
The rocky road to
Dublin,
Bubblin' like a rockfight
Underneath our feet
There's an absurdly non-sequiturial
defeat—
How did we get to Ireland?
I thought this was...
A Spanish-speaking caliphate?
What makes the prophet salivate?
Who ordered all this rain?
Who are the post-
Apocalyptic partisans?
The artisans of pain?
Are we really bound for hell?
Is there any other way?
Are you a path unto the darkness?
Is there a narrow, righteous gate?
“Women are paths into the dark:
I'm like the rest.”
Marina Tsvetaeva
Whether we plumb the depths of the bottomless
pits of the poetry of longing, or of
damage, what's the
difference—
I've done my time
In the madhouse of the inhumans,
And I don't want to make you feel
bad, but can't you see I'm
Healing?
©2025 Nathan Payne
