Leonid Sboyko - Mind Over Matter. 72 assorted poems in English by a Russian

Of all time measure units
Day is one true:
The rest are merely conventions
To human counting due.
The morning, noon, then evening, night,
Then dawn again – that’s always right:
There’s never other cycle —
A change unchangeable like a …
Like what, indeed? Like what?

Future’s horizon
We never reach
Stuck in the Present
And our memories
Future’s the cradle
Of our dreams
We’re freer there
Than we can be
By Past, in the Present, for Future we live:
What due to, what in and what for;
Past is the one which
We so quickly enrich,
Present’s a fiction,
Future, we miss and put off

Believe the Time Inside about its speed
For it’s the other one that cheats:
The one we check by glancing at a clock,
The one whose pace we take in as a shock.

The river flows,
The sunset glows,
The wind, forsaken, freely blows,
My timer quicker and quicker slows
And soon comes to a stand;
The heat still beats,
My pulse still reads,
I peacefully wonder where it leads

A rainy, rainy, rainy day
A good old chess game left to play…
I wish the day would stay
And I would play
Lifetimes away…

Time wears not
But it makes one wear
Some find it cruel
Some find it fair

Civilization of sleepwalkers,
Civilization of small talkers —
That’s who we are,
That’s today’s broad karma!
That’s where we would end up webbed
But few first years having kept
At curb, in sweet deceit,
In which I would have rather leapt
Once and for all, again,
To never wake up to the realm
Of those who sleep when walking,
Of those nothingtalking.

Everybody knows what it’s all about,
Nobody knows what for:
Hi-smi-ling and signing
And politely dining
Then feeling incredibly bored…
Nobody relates
To my diving today
In a cold mountain lake.

Too many people close about
Make a crowd.
Moscow’s endowed with it, no doubt:
We abound,
We are all around
Whom have we found?
No one to be the One,
No sooth to be the Truth,
No win worth having won,
No fighting nail and tooth.

Too many people, not too many friends —
A common big places’ notable trend,
To lonely homes the way to wend,
Away from small places, from which we were rent.

Too many things that are currently on —
The shows – why not – might indeed go on
So all our talks are of shows we’ve seen
And just city places, to which we have been.
You write to your province friends of this waterspout
But there’s nothing you feel worth writing about —
To them, that all is city talk,
Which we ill-strenuously balk.

Too many people close about
No place to stay out
You are alone
But not quite your own
You are quite single
But you have to mingle…
Time gets by —
Hard to ask it why —
And you are just a slice
Of one big apple-pie.

Too many people for so few places
Homes to mad and futile races
For better and better stuff and gadgets to have
But everyone needs somebody to love.

Too many people close about
Make a crowd
But no-one’s as close to thee
As you would want him to be.
We abound,
We are all around —
Whom have we found?

Lots of people, little space:
One hot dirty endless race,
One for pleasure, leisure, place,
One immeasurable craze.

Lots of people, little space:
All big cities are a race…
One must really be small
To fit in it with us all

ComPunication

We are some of the first of those
Who have had their first nice dose
Of computerized communication:
A dose of comPunication.
Why meet
If you can have your seat
In your place
While I can in mine
And still communicate?
There’s the web, the phone, the personal page,
The social network, there’s all the rage
So let’s comPuniCage!
It’s neat
For you can have your seat
In your nameless city
And I can in mine
Grab the keyboard, hit it!
Sorry, my e-friend, I didn’t know
That you by this time have grown so old
I haven’t logged out for twenty-five years
I’ve always been near, e-near.
But then again…
Why meet
If you can get old in your place
And I can in mine
And still get old, get old, get old
Non-e-old…
Undo! Undo! Undo the changes!

If in a place of many
You don’t have a penny
The many around you won’t probably help:
Life ain’t so sunny
Where everyone’s running
For nothing but money.
It cannot be helped.

Deep, very deep in the taiga forest
Where the beautiful fir-tree grows
A squat plain log-built loner’s cottage
Stands in the thick of the grove.
The ski-path meandering endlessly through
The realm of the evergreen muffled with snow
Brings me to the hut not really soon —
I’ve come here to spend time alone.
Cold and tired but happy and hopeful
I stoke up the oven and unpack the victuals.
The sky is starry, the flame is joyful,
Life seems so suddenly simple.

Don’t talk to me
The way the talk should be,
Talk to me free,
Don’t sing to me,
For all I want from thee
Is just sincerity.
So don’t talk to me
Like they talk on TV,
Don’t quarrel with me
Like they do in the movies,
But do it sincerely,
Do it upfront,
Do it so thoroughly
I am right away stunned;
Don’t do it right,
But do it your way,
Do it at night
And during the day.
Don’t talk to me
The way the talk should be,
Talk to me free.

Hometown-bound

A long steel rail
That we all have seen
With its maddening steadiness
And its lamp-side sheen
Carries on carrying us
To the places we’ve been
Helping to go back
To the pasts long gone…
Some nice, some lived irreversibly wrong.
People who live there
Live on in our past
Which seems to be bound
To always last.

The subject can be narrow or broad:
It ranges from ‘lapel’ to ‘Lord’,
It may be quite a panorama
But here’s today’s communication drama:
It’s never deep however broad:
We listen but we soon get bored.
Recurring to computers, TV, books,
Indulging in embellishing our looks,
We shallower soon become,
To coreless, flashy life succumbed.

When Russia was said to have been sold
I wasn’t sold on that:
The heart of this country is inert to gold,
The song is infinitely sad.

One hundred yards they sleep underneath
The stormy chest of the Barents Sea
In an iron, iron black submarine
Day after day into eternity…
Penned captain-lieutenant, ‘We’re twenty-three’…
…‘we’ll be twenty-three and here we’ll be’…