(Excerpt from a poem "The Ways of Cain", Trans. by V.Postnikov, Drift Aweigh Press, 2001)
XIII. THE STATE
1.
From surplus aggregate
Of speed, machines and greed,
The State emerged.
The fortress, sword and law
Made citizenship strong,
A huge and armored stomach
Where people played the role of
The digestive microbs. Here
All’s based on benefits,
The profit, and the costs,
The fittest, the survival and the force.
Its moral – healthy egoism,
Its purpose – that of the digestion;
A measure of the culture –
Clean latrines and
Full capacities of defecation.
2.
Most ancient state regalia:
Production of the blood.
A Judge, resuming once again Cain’s function,
Is rendered sinless and immune;
Competitors are murdered.
3.
Out of all violence created by a Man,
The slaughter is the least.
The gravest – education.
The rulers can’t remove their heirs,
But can destroy the fortunes of the latter.
Thus, every child is harshly tamed;
The purpose of upbringing –
Mutilation.
That’s why, next to a hangman
Stand the schools,
Skilled at releasing
Disinfected,
Gelded children.
4.
Fisc is a fraud,
The ownership – a theft,
Because the robbery’s the only
Legal form of asset acquisition.
State has monopoly
To issue forged cash. The profiles
on the banknotes – could they be
the fingertips, the receipts of the crime?
Yet hands of robbers stretch too long
To keep their assets stolen.
They certainly deserve
To be the Founding Fathers
Solemn.
5.
When in our days we go to free elections –
We prove our own capacity for lying and for crime.
Therefore,
The leader of the Parliament,
By all the rules,
Must be the most impudent man.
The politics is, really, a filthy business;
It needs experienced and practical riffraff
Not squeamishing about the blood or corpses.
However, voters still believe
Three hundred rascals built an honest
Nation.
6.
There is much wisdom in the world,
Yet one truth towers:
A trite and all-accepted one:
Prepared out of a dirt,
For any taste or brain;
It’s served habitually
On print-out papers;
It’s swallowed in the trams, injected in the mornings,
So everyone has firm convictions.
Along with syphilis, tobacco, and the gin
Produced by State,
Comes Vaterland;
Of all patented drugs –
Newspapers are the worst
(And bring large profits,
By the way.)
7.
Two classes normally stay lawless in the State:
The criminals and rulers.
Under revolution,
They simply interchange their place –
Which, in effect, the same.
But those in power
Indulge in theft, and violence and shootings;
The massacres and revolutions
Eventually turn into court.
Thus revolutions overrun the war.
They reinforce the State
At each rebelious spasm
Of savage mass unrest,
The iron barrels clench the gristled neck.
The loyalty, espionage, delations, censors -
They all are revolutions’ record.
13 April 1922
vip/2001