Thursday, September 1, 2011

Pushkin's Home

Please don’t forget your faithful

friend—he’s running away again

from home and all he’s known and

been to everything he cannot


be kind of mild to beasts like

him—his mind and his eye are dim

from all the stars he’s taken in

imagination now defiled:


he’s really running wild,

he’s nothing that he wants to be,

(but he’s free)

and what’s wild, wild, wild

and what’s free?


Pushkin tell me, tell me true before you die

Rush and show me, are you freely being wild


Non-stop I beg the star spots to

shine the straying path home

but I know God knows I’m fooling myself

and faith has nowhere to go


Bring back the fooling myself

Push me home


Bring back the fooling myself

Push me home


See everything I try to

find—this Pushkin is wasting time

a guinea pig we named for him, a

kind of playful ploy by


me, who brought the rodent home one

day—I thought that he’d want to stay

the creature comforts were in place

they never mattered anyway


[repeat all boldface]


turn trim days and toss thin

nights—hardly had a plan of flight

the next door lady with dubious

sight stopped her tracks just to stare at a burrowing


blur at the base of her clustered

trees—and suddenly we're on our knees

we catch the blame rat with relative

ease and justify the face of things


Bring back the fooling myself

Push me home

1 comment:

  1. I added a third verse--the rhythm is different when put to the fading-out melody, but I still wanted to format the stanzas similarly.

    What's the resolution here? Like Hemingway's short story, "A Soldier's Home", we aren't sure if the soldier has returned to a house he once knew as home or if the home is 'his' as an apostrophe s suggests. We don't know where he is, emblematic of the 'lost generation'. I guess I wanted "Pushkin's Home" to have some of those questions embedded.

    Hope soon to record the song in a track; Joey has a good bass line going...

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