northern wolf

Lenin sits
banging on his old typewriter,
that 1961 model with
the sticky S key and
a missing question mark.
This goddamn great novel
will not be coaxed so easily
from its Platonic cave it seems.

Summer, 1979, 4th street.
It's like a scene from an American film,
curtains in the breeze of a summer day
while the smells of human endeavor drift
through the open windows.

Russia, the idea of
a Soviet worker's state,
just an image, a memory.
Only America now, and fuck it
there will be a great American novel
spilling from his worker's
stiff and callused fingers.
American because
the line between the haves
and the have-nots is deep,
flows down into the bedrock,
forms a crucial part of the foundation.

Yet this is old news and
there are other divisions
worth celebrating
and writing about.

From the apartment down below,
same time as every day,
the sounds of rock and roll.