Russkaya Amerika

No low-life comment ever came your way from this devil. The sadness is overpowering, like all-day darkness of a winter polar station. They light my life like a deep film, all diffused, grey light through dripping windows. Somehow here, this battered and bleached hut is home to many poor people; they live off begged and stolen food, in a room blackened by the smoke of the struggling stove. They should have the power of art, the talent for words to show what has happened to them but they lie still, smoking and reading as the weather ranges through its extremes outside. They do not starve, they somehow manage to keep just alive enough to want more than the food and warmth which sustains them. I walk amongst them, with my own hang-ups and think I would love this life, the garret life, led by every worthwhile artist over the years. The ground so far below, beckons with it rainy sheen or snowy coverings and I feel like climbing out onto guttering. The winter trees strech up to this place, as if trying to keep the decaying clapboard up. The brothers are helping each other, the living trees supporting their dead and dried kin. The woodyard is an evil place. Here, the rough orange wood is stacked up and left to itself for years until the snow has blown away and the lorries come to take this new wood away.

The snow steals all sound save for a continuous muffling, the sound of snow falling. Even a large branch, finally giving up and falling to the ground, makes no more sound than the padding fox out in the woods stalking mice. Reynard turns at the sound and then returns to his lonely trail. He is dead and he knows it; he is dead regardless of the men in their red coats or the baying dogs. No man will have to dig him out of earth and throw him to the pack. Winter takes many foxes as it takes many of all of us. There are coughs from inside the house, satisfying, liquid-filled coughs of those drowning in themselves. Winter takes many of us.

A hemisphere away, a man takes his breakfast in the sun of California. This is a man with a steady life, a gravy train of Government and big-business. He makes the tat which we all think we need. He kills people with the stuff he makes. Sometimes he thinks about this but he can always justify his line of work. He is just a cog and if he didn't earn this decent living, someone else would. These bombs are made by committee so no one is ever to blame wholly. He has children so he tells himself with great ease that he is not a monster. The sharp end of his business never comes to him. The final resting place of the smooth and hygenic metal things he designs are in some blank or dark corner of his brain. He knows it is all Ok and he is at peace with his God who whispers to him every night that the dead have it coming anyway. They could get knocked down by a bus couldn't they? In their tents in the dusty sand - so like the mountains outside the city - they are meant for what ever comes their way. Not that our man ever thinks these words in his head; They just happen somewhere as a thought that crosses his mind when ever he feels that maybe there is some less-tainted way of making money. These thoughts always fade as he climbs into his blood-coloured european car and accelerates off to the most unnecessary skyscraper on the whole of the Eastern seaboard. It falls into the sea at the slightest tremor but only in his dreams. This man has killed more people than anyone else on earth. He says he has a talent for building missiles but then again maybe so have I. I may have a talent like this, I do not know but I know I will never find out.

Out in the snowy woods, the night is falling. The wooden houses creak in the wind, a cache for hidden weapons the home of a second proposed revolution and we walk away, our hands deep in the pockets of our coats. The guns rust and crumble, cemented into their bunkers until not one is useable. We have grown old and crumbled like them. Out in the woods the skeletons of older victims bleach white in summers and then turn to sludgy plaster with the rain. Our Tsar is still with our children and left to himself he learns to keep himself to himself. The house vanishes and then is cleared and excavated. With prayers and other spirituals, the ground is flattened and this real-place becomes a wood again. The madmen they once dumped here have been cleaned up and sent back home; our cures have been written up and sit unread in some electronic backwater.

One man makes all the trouble and still sleeps well at night, unguarded. His one design, a boiler plate machine gun, a design classic, like some apple, some branded must-have grey accessory, still at his side as if to indicate his status in the world of hard men and freedom fighters. This weapon whistles in the wind, a tight string against the gales of Russia, a killing thing of immense simplicity, this grey and black automatic rifle has replaced the flick-knife of choice, licensed and unlicensed round the world to make us bleed. In piles they take them from the agents and the mysterious children. They look good with any uniform or and freedom fighters rags. In a shed in some cold republic, little women steal in at dawn to assemble these things. They turn them out, thousands in every day, gold-plated, special editions, bog-standard always grey cheapness available to anyone who can steal a couple of hundred dollars, just one mobile phone from a punter with a wristwatch as big as his head. The stampers never stop; they keep making the steel sides to each and every weapon, uncontrolled unmaintained until the winter comes down hard and steals the light and even then the engines chuff off more until the ground is nothing more than gun parts piled up like drying wood. The boot in the human face is one thing, the never-ending manufacture of these is quite another. From the customs man, searching for smuggled sturgeon, to the fanatic assassin wound-up by the rich-kid terrorist, this toy-maker has caught them all. He tells himself he was at the end of orders. The wood drones on and he can lose himself in this Dacha by the sea and live of all the captured caviar his guns bring in.

I dream all this and more but I do not sleep well because these men do.