city life

by Ross Vassilev

another cancer Monday
and you’ll see a light in the sky
pulled by an old man
wearing dumpster shoes
and the brick walls
will be innocent
and you’ll open your palm
and find a butterfly
resting there
and you'll forget about
all the slaughter
in the name of free markets
and you’ll say aloud
all wisdom is found
in the heartless gutters of the world
and it’ll mean more
than all the bullshit
you hear on the corporate news.

broken bottles

by Ross Vassilev

I remember walking home
from work
streets littered with
the broken bottles
of the past
and there was my fat queer boss
and the Polish girl
who was always wearing
miniskirts
showing her fat white thighs
that I still can't stop
thinking of
and lonely parking lot nights
and this what you get
for $5.50 an hour in this
broken down corner of time
in the universe.

halcyon days

by Ross Vassilev

world full of
powerless, penniless
revolutionaries
screaming their ideas
onto paper
while serial killers
and outlaw bikers
roam California highways

disillusioned Trotskyites
feeding their hunger
on the stale bread
of frustration
while junkies sit in alleys
brains shredded
by LSD

a tear for the lost
is a wet brown leaf
in Autumn

those who know
sit in hot empty rooms
in the cancerous summer
tubes in their arms
pumping them full of
insanity
and stark raving loneliness

they sweat the blood
of the Gods
so remember them
as the sky fills with sulfur.

poem for Fidel's birthday

by Ross Vassilev

Jack and Bobby
tried to assassinate Fidel Castro

instead
Jack and Bobby
got whacked
and today is August 13th
Fidel's 88th birthday

Fidel is one of those men
whose words and deeds
shake the world
bring down thunder and gale
from the sky

and maybe the man
with the long brown beard
and the white dove on his shoulder
still has many years ahead of him

maybe he'll yet spread the revolution
al norte to all the lands
illegally occupied by the Anglos
so that freedom and socialism
may finally flower
over all the lands of the earth

we can only hope.

category: uniform

by Ross Vassilev

when the
beautiful
blonde, blue-eyed
policewoman
arrested me
I thought of
telling her that I'd seen
porn movies that
started this way
but I decided not to
push my luck

it's hard walking
when they got
your ankles
cuffed together

it was a hot
summer night and
there was a full moon out
for the misbegotten

I suddenly thought of
all the homeless
in New York
disheveled winos
old women
pushing shopping carts

the inside
of the police car
was hot and steamy

and being in a
hot, steamy place
with a beautiful
blonde
wasn't so bad, really

I wondered
if she had a boyfriend.

newsfront

by Ross Vassilev

watching a report on Al-Jazeera
about all the massacres
the NATO militaries have committed
in Afghanistan
wiping out whole families
whole villages
and I realized
there is no justice in this world
no God to protect the weak
and the innocent
there's only power
brutality
and bodies strewn across
so many floors.

blandest

by Ross Vassilev

wandering the streets after walking off the job

nothing to do and nowhere to go

I snuck into a movie theater
and don't even remember what I saw

lost along empty sidewalks

it felt both good and bad
to be alone as the wind sang
through the April sun

menaced by stuffed men
in white shirts and ties

I thought
all these losers who only know how to make money

at least I wasn't one of them.

nude young girls

by Ross Vassilev

29 Buddhas lined up on the mantelpiece
and that's supposed to be a metaphor of something
but I forgot what it means
after a while a kind of lethargy sets in
you stare out the window at the crooked rain
the roses are dead and the clock is broken
(metaphorically speaking)
I once walked in front of a moving car
with supreme indifference
the woman behind the wheel swerved to miss me
and I couldn't have cared less
no, this caterpillar won't be growing any wings
just blowing arsenic at the wasted stars
and waiting for whatever the fuck comes next.

why madmen should never edit poetry zines

by Ross Vassilev

sitting
alone
in a small
room
reading
the poem/
submissions
while
the oranges
rot
and a crack
opens
in the window
of my mind.

the sunflowers are feeling pretty damn low

by Ross Vassilev

there's the little white pills
the big white pills
the oblong pills
and the square green pills
all these pills are making me dizzy
sometimes I stagger and fall
once I banged my head off the fridge door
another time I banged it off a wall
but I can't get any dumber
so no worry
there's young women walking by my window
with their pink toenails and summer thighs
there's hungry stray dogs
I've spent 10 years in this small room
prisoner of my family's insanity
and my own
while the American Empire tore up the world
like a vengeful whore
and I can say that all I regret
is that I never met Jack Micheline
or Bukowski
and that I was ever born into this idiot asshole universe
in the first place.

metaphor of what?

by Ross Vassilev

the head rests on the forearm
the head is limp and mostly empty
awash in morbidity
contemplating the emptiness of the cosmos
or at least this corner of it
the head curses Bulgarians
and people
remembering the screaming
the insanity
the loneliness and despair
remembering marianne faithfull
and her sweet voice as
ophelia
the head is reborn each morning
only to die slowly during the course
of the day
the head repeats silently to itself
namu amida buddha
namu amida buddha
namu amida buddha
the Pure Land is the place full of sun
where the trees always sway in the wind
and maybe that's
the only place there is.

skulls

by Ross Vassilev

night crawls on its belly
and somewhere in Cleveland
a young man gets stabbed to death
in a parking lot--
the bottle is empty
the doors are locked
headless mice lie in the yard
I'm starting to understand leeches
and serial killers
I try to cheer myself up
thinking of lipstick lezzies
blue warblers
and the foreign occupiers getting slaughtered
at Ong Thanh
but the light at the end of tunnel
ain't no on-coming train
just a neon bulb that's flickering out.

poverty

by Ross Vassilev

is
when
you live in a small rental apartment
on the ground floor of a 2-story building
and the people upstairs
have a small kid who never stops running around
so it's like you're living under a bowling alley
that's always open
and there's no way to ignore that
even meditation won't work
so you bang on the ceiling with a bat
and they stomp on the floor in return
and you start going crazy
and when you see your upstairs neighbors in the hallway
you can't stand the sight of each other
and the whole thing is so very un-Buddhist
but they're not to blame
and I'm not to blame
and you hope that some day
you'll have the money to buy a house
so there won't be anyone living upstairs anymore
and you can finally live in peace
as you were meant to
but until then you just wait for the day
when Time it will take us all
to a better place.

stone

by Ross Vassilev

birdsong in the summer dusk
and I can count the good times
on the fingers
of one hand

looking back
on all the screaming
all the insanity
I often wonder how I made it through
all that

I often go for walks at
this hour with the purple glow coming down
  from the cosmos
but not tonight

I see people walking
drawn by the city lights
and as much as
  the stone image of some God

I am alive.

ode to Hugo Chavez

by Ross Vassilev

Bulgarians
are now
immolating themselves
to protest the poverty
their post-communist rulers
have thrown them into.

they weren't doing that under communism.

I live in the U.S. of A.
the nation that is the greatest enemy of socialism
since the Red Army destroyed Nazi Germnay.

in the U. S. of A.
there is the cult of the soldier

we're supposed to honor the troops
worship them as heroes and demi-gods

let me tell you something:

the troops can go fuck themselves

and the fascist government they fight for

and the corporations that own that government.

let me tell you something else:

in the 21st century
socialism is gonna liberate the world
from you white Anglo pigs
so that the people of the world
will finally live in peace and prosperity and decency

and if you don't believe me
remember what Uncle Ho said:

we'll fight one day longer than you will.

Jesus loves you

by Ross Vassilev

you were
never
no son of god

you were
a long-haired
wandering hippie
pacifist
who gave it all away
for free

then they made you
a god of war

but you still got
true followers
occupying Wall Street
and marching in Palestine

sacrificing their blood
for the cause
just like you did
so long ago.

Pure Land

by Ross Vassilev

I prayed to Buddha to fix my heart
and I'll be damned if he didn't
and they say Buddha ain't a God
but I prayed to him anyway and it worked
and when I look at my hands sitting on the table
with the sun falling on them
I think of Buddha
and when I drive through some place at night
and the neon lights are all glowing
I think of Buddha
and when I remember all the crazy things I've done--
smashing windows, petty sex crimes and the rest--
I think of Buddha
so you can worship whoever the fuck you want
but Buddha's always there for me
when I need him.

say what?

by Ross Vassilev

there'll be no white elephants
crossing my path

the I may be an illusion
but all poets seek fame and glory

the I may be an illusion
but the memories in my head are real

and the anger and the rage
are all too real

I'll lay myself down in the nectar
of the black rose of night

and maybe the Gods will visit me
bearing a thousand gifts

or maybe just one gift
red as a plum

and when the world finally drowns
in the last great flood

maybe my salvation
will be in others' suffering.

no, I don't support the troops...

by Ross Vassilev

if you mean the American troops in Afghanistan
cuz all they're doing is
killing women and children.
if you wanna show me some troops I can support
gimme the Viet Cong fighting in the jungle
outnumbered 10 to 1
running from the enemy's choppers
and B-52's
gimme the Soviet soldier
dying by the millions in the mud of Belarus
or in the streets of Stalingrad
fighting the Nazis
Red Star shining from every cap
gimme Fidel and his band of brothers
ambushing the enemy with their machetes
in the heat of the Sierra Maestra
gimme any of them and all of them
but don't call what the G.I.'s are doing
in Afghanistan
heroism
cuz it's a fucking debasement of the word.

$40 co-pay

by Ross Vassilev

sometimes I think

I've got every disease known to man

I've seen so many fuckin doctors

over the years

and I know all you doctors

made so much fuckin money off me

the co-pays and

deductibles

and all the useless shit

that helped you pay the mortgages

on yr 3-story homes

you're all a bunch of fuckin crooks

every one of ya

America is just one big con game

everybody's trying to con everybody else

those who can, get rich

and those who can't

sell drugs on the corner

it's all a big sick rat race

and there ain't no end to it

but you're still the shining city on a hill

right?