"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains."
“Listen & Learn Russian”
“Allow me to introduce you...,”
were the words the needle pulled and culled
from the flat and shaking vinyl disk
atop the running, carven lines beneath its rumbling body.
The etchings upon the record spun and wobbled,
appearing almost rubber--supple
like shivering time leaking down and below a Spanish canvas’
wretched walls.
“pahz-VAWL-tyeh vas puz-nah-KAW-m-eet,”
the rustic ageless man continued from within the outline of his ashen world
into which only the point of the needle could still dip,
after a pause long enough only for the shallow breath of tempo
to exhale.
The American boy with straight teeth and loose clothes
brought the pocket-sized book with its foggy smell closer,
trying to mold his mouth to the shape of foreign letters and sounds
too deep and woolen for his throat to twist.
“Pas vall teh,”
he spat out, trying to catch up to the racing phrases
of the spectral voice of his acoustic mentor,
whose words never waited single-file for him to arrive just in time, panting,
but rather turned the corner before he had even time to run his hands across
the hallway’s leading patterned bricks.
The boy rose the arm of the stylus upward,
only to drop it down again and again,
searching for the familiar rhythm of predisposed monotony
in a dizzying world he still had yet to endure for the first time.
He opened and closed the inch thick cardboard
which housed fifteen hours worth of “living language” and “unconditional guarantee”’s,
tucked away between the brownish stains of previous owners,
and the wrinkles of old wax folded between their many sundry fingers.
As the boy tried to trace ornate Cyrillic letters with his tongue,
to inspire vibrations too caustic yet cursive to cultivate on this side of the world,
he thought that perhaps all hitherto history was not the history of class struggle,
but rather the history of miscommunication.
He chewed upon the rigid lines of the alphabet and the
residue of words hovering about his widened room
as he thought that just maybe each nation’s and each people’s
words and stories and designs,
once drifting in an open and endless pool,
crashed upon the rocks of separate necessity like the ocean tide,
each breaking off and being soaked up into thirsting sand.
He thought that perhaps the tide could never still,
not because of the water’s rushing rant,
but because of the rocks’ and the sands’ dry hands reaching forth to wash,
for the foam on the upper lip of the world spoke volumes.
The boy turned a page of the grainy paper,
pulling each end of the manual to stretch and crack its spine,
as he dipped his head backward into the undercurrent of
waiting water before it could filter itself along the thorny bank.
He held the needle in his hand,
replacing and repositioning its tip
along the unceasing contours
of, “How are things?”
(“kahk-dyeh-LAH?”)
and, “I’d like to see Comrade Gvozdev”
(“yah khah-CHOO V EE-dyet tah-VAH-r ee-shchah gvahz-DYAW-vah.”)
Small notches of soaked sand stuck beneath his fingernails
as he held his breath to swim to the bleeding horizon,
floating in the roving sea before the tide could come from underneath
to sweep him, his words, and everything else--away.