The Broken Friendship

By Kim Golubev

We are the past men

We are the present men

we are lost men.

We are men who lost their merit

instead of past and present times.

We are the ones who talk post-modern

like its linguistic basis measures lives.

Here is a little fellow.

He waits for summer,

knows his rights.

“Last time you wrote me,

you signed as Mary,

so I decided to ignore the tact;

I’ve got rid of the formal customs;

I address you now as a friend.

Sometimes I have to set reminders

to call you not my sister, but

those who craft the kinships,

must have had learned the bureaucratic art.

They are mistaken. Bonds are a glimpse.

Unless we want them to re-form the meaning.

Formality.

Formality.

Formality and all.

The autumn is getting older. It is confused

because it ages inappropriately.

Its elder formidability causes its enigmatic confusion:

the autumn sometimes thinks it is summer.

But the mountain slopes that face you

most certainly agreed –

the winter is upon us.

Beware of colds and fever.

The gardens here proclaim the right

for the thought that the autumn keeps imposing.

The roses flourish, flourish, flourish,

like a sound of an Italian opera song. Senza di te languisce il cor.

They enjoy the sun and

the bliss of being

Da-sein Da-rain Dah-брен Duh.

Tanto rigor.

Since we’ve arrived here,

I do nothing.

I talk, I eat, I look and sleep.

I gained some weight,

I gained some rigor,

I gained some powers

and some vigor—

you might not see to recognize.

Today we, like some English tourists,

had a picnic on a lost crossroad.

The view here worth a silent bow.

I have enjoyed it, lying down

and hiding my head in a lavender bush,

with my hat on my nose.

They think I slept.

I have, but later

I will proclaim I listened to the lark.

Now, I sit on the edgy rock above the road above the sky

above the people

above you.

The only cloud clouding my mood

is a little puff, produced by a sudden farmer.

I think she is a farmer,

but she as well might be

a mere recipient of the farming goods.

She’s old, she’s wrinkled, she has a load

covered by an ancient fabric

over her little bogie cart

behind her donkey.

I want to bet that all she has is onions.

I want to believe that she has ambrosia and nectar,

but onions, I bet, is all she has.

On such a flourishing day

she has to have the nectar and ambrosia.

(at least some grapes and peaches)

So the cloud, bursting by the wheels

of the bogie cart,

can make some sense.

But we are honest men:

she only has some onions.

The dust settles down.

We are at the present.

The present shows:

We are at the crossroad

at the center of tweeting mountains.

Behind us is England,

France and Europe are at the right,

Russia and Asia are at the left,

In front of us — the Ocean of Peace.

And above us is a dome of sapphire.

And all five are in such proximity,

so I can reach my hand and

pluck any of them to send you

as a gift.

Even if the postal service

won’t obstruct my gift,

citing some regulations

and laws

that prohibit us from sense and peace,

(Formality,

formality,

formality encore)

the beauty of any of these five

will cease to mean a thing

while in transit.

They will become terrifying,

awful, daunting, fierce, and false.

Instead, I better send you

a branch of rosemary

and a fragrant twig of lavender.

I am still angry with the old owner of the onion cart.

She interrupted my thought right in the middle of a tale

I had come up with.

Have you ever

ever ever

told a tale

to your sad self?

Have you ever,

ever never,

never liked

a thought you felt?

Are you too old?

My tale looks like a fresco

made by Benozzo Gozzoli:

a little king,

overly dressed and superficially gallant,

accordingly to the noble domain,

goes over the hills

and over the bills,

through a thoughtful and

overly cautiously

well-prepared lane,

as the jagged crown

shines over his head.

I love the old masters

because they were crafters

that never refused real gold.

They never were fooling

their respectable public

with the yellow shadows and lights

like post-modern wits do.

My kings are more real

and their ordeal

would refuse even the plainest golden crest.

Their clothes’ appeal

with a fanciful zeal

was restoring the path of oppressed.

But this is only but a tale,

and a rosemary dale

has enough branches to start a blaze.

Or a little campfire

that revitalizes

our picnic’s preoccupied aim.

We need to start one

before the onion farmer and the kings reach their lands.

We are the lost men

We are the present men

we are gilded men.

Sometimes I have to set reminders

to call you not my sister.

For we were nursed upon the self-same hill,

fed the same flock; by fountain, shade, and rill.”

We are singing,

as did the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills.

While the onion cart went out with the dust of gray;

we’ve touched the gilded crowns of selfish quills,

with eager thought warbling our modern lay;

and now the sun has stretched out all the mountain hills,

and now was dropped into the western bay;

at last, I rose and twitched my tale and dream in lieu

of tomorrow fresh thoughts and pastures new.

Kim Golubev is a teaching associate at California State University, Sacramento. The focus of Kim’s academic study is the Long 18th Century, and his thesis paper topic explored a connection between humanist ideas in Alexander Pope's works and posthuman ideological shift of the contemporary speculative fiction. Kim is a recipient of Patrick Michael Ewing Memorial Scholarship for his academic excellence and commitment to the department of English, CSUS, over the past several years. In the past, Kim was a poetry editor of the Calaveras Station Arts & Literary Journal, CSUS. He is a poet and an emerging writer. Being multilingual, he writes prose and poetry in English, French, Ukrainian, and Russian. Kim’s academic strives aim for a Ph.D. in English Literature that he plans to obtain in the nearest future.