The Cyrillic words are still on the wallcursing the canvas of communist brickand behind are towering cranes, like antlers on faceless game, theirrust is a tired oak. The blocks they’ve religiously raised are now in careless solitude, their balconies like misread obituaries in the pages preceding the sports section. An uneven row of trees break the concrete among the metallic sewer pipes and the frozen cars that litter the lot, the cracked asphalt is at a loss of wordseach tree deprived of a common language.One block towers the rest, I squint and feel the retinas stirtwenty-three stories of chalked stone like a surreal work of art, the yellow venations spread in and out of view haphazardly.Wreckage and fallen pilasters arethe pupils of this theatre, they insatiably gaze at Lenin’s hanged iconsin remembrance of the harsh Russian words from the end of cigarettesin the cold of 1986.Vodka rations were given and men loved less, so they built a Farris wheel in the school yard.From the window, a child lookedfrom his elusive Manifestoto imagine how small Kiev must look the day he’d sit atop the ellipse. 25 years later his bed is absentminded and unmade. He didn’t know it would never spin. For days there was word on the street thatif a man climbed atop the erectedtower with a bag of sand in hand,those two minutes spared two years of shooting scum at the borders.But instead, men and their children rotted from the inside. How quickly death comes to all who gather around the unclean phallus.Atoms hasten to break our bonds and I am in awe.This city wants to be.
