Author's website Alexander Korotko

To Paris with distaste. Festive despair. In the confusion of not

your life you want to be look  like others,  thirsting, passionate,

who took the geographical location as absolute, as the endless

point of happiness on the way of frustration, a  bookplate of human

senses, having recognized the defeat of tin soldiers fleeing from

the ship of weekdays, poisoned with a consciousness of innocence

to the events of the unbridled era.

 

Out of the late green foliage, out of the phrases, half-turn abandoned, 

out of stellar honeycombs of the night dew,  life appealed to us

on You by Chagall’s dream, by Klimt’s gold. And Babylon of love was

falling at your feet, a funny Paris, and it was our mystery, and the

rain on the buttons of  homeless roofs was playing a melody of

longing, and this casual talk was overheard by my temples, and the bell

was sounding inside me at the concert hall of silence where I was hiding
from the spring, and a candle of the moon was melting, and srearine

was dripping with a white tear, and the dawn was growing with the Eiffel

Tower, and Van Gogh was drawing the morning not with a mad brush,

but with a chalk.

Paris, I’m your Gobsek, a curator of human weaknesses, and a vain crowd,

painfully close in spirit and doubts to me, I submit your claims, as they do

not burn in the fire. Human nature has a vicious face of passions, you lived

with them, you cherished them, then scattered on the ground but seedings

are gathered by people, Well, and how we can convict them now if blood

doesn’t flow through the veins of past life, when in a cherished secret

darkness, in a perishable pawn shop, their daily lives are resting like

receipts, a different way is prepared for them, we can’t live another’s fates,

when obelisks of hope found their peace in the damp earth. You can’t take

advantage of it, can’t secure a grip on love, when our children grow up,
when now not we are responsible for  them, but powerful feelings of dream

with which they’re on “you”.

In your air there is a transforming power of unknown love, a tear, petrified

under the weight of time, on the window-sill of dreams it brought up cactuses

of memories and settled Bonaparte’s nightmare of gutless history into tired

hearts. Each life has its own island, its own expulsion into the sorrow, ruthless

apostle of destiny, night patrol of dumb questions, cities of memories, where

the shadows of years call us for a visit at the stations before and after, where

the years of silence blossom. Paris, you breathe this air by memory, you turn

people’s hearts into ashes again and again, and the blood runs cold in Seine.

In the chain of heartless events only the wind is lending a hand, The ship

of destiny is ready to sail, and it has been sailing for a long time already.
There is no France any more, no Paris, and your disfigured spirit is shouting 
out of the chest as a seagull: I will not see you any more! – but the stone

city is silent. Gauguin is tired, he can hear speechless sounds of stars, oh,

your coast, Tahiti, tortures of dying painting. And a mix of colors will come

true and it will be for sure, but don’t believe the painters, and a paintbrush,

what is a paintbrush, just Devil secretly sleeps in it, and after awaking, he

creates.

Having wasted pathetic hopes you come back to Paris, and like the naked

River Seine, lie under the lived sky. Nobody’s station, nobody’s museum,

paintings, people who are more agile, not all are based in d’Orsay, and indeed,

eternity has it’s own sleepy sight at the crazy tribe of the killed creative

soldiers who perceived unearthly time, its obsession flattery, a swarm of

disappointments and triumphs. Well, how are you there? And we receive

the answer – but all of us are here.