Exiting the Enigma

My stay here in Moscow comes to a close with a pre-dawn trip to the airport with Rosalie while it's still dark out. 3:30 am check-outs are always a beast. It's too late to pull an all-nighter, knowing customs & immigration awaits you at dawn, and it's way too early to get anything resembling decent sleep. Grrrr. Penned some closing thoughts on the plane before take-off. Gotta find a way back here with more time to kill, and hopefully with enough cash to get by, cause things aren't cheap out here... This is the kind of place a history buff could really sink their teeth into...

long rides on roads framed by tenements aging with the weight of decaying paint
turquoise-topped eastern orthodox churches filled with portraits of bearded saints
random police checkpoints for troopers to peep our papers
a city of billionaires and dubious white collar bank capers
suffused into every street corner, relics of a revolution gone wrong
a reminder of a century ruled by an unaccountable throng
theoretical foundations of a nation that cratered in on itself
collapsed in exhaustion
the cost in human capital was too high
i watch cumulus clouds piling up against a blue spring sky
smokestacks ringing the river
industrial facades
a century of cultivated indifference to God
a state whose mandate was far too broad
i bring American baggage to this place
staring at the silhouettes of Slavic faces
stoic staid unsmiling men wearing inscrutable scowls
some lean & squinting & others flushed with ruddy jowls
gesturing with gloved hands & brows furrowed against the wind
foreheads wrinkling as they eye women impossibly thin
leggy nordic beauties tottering by in precarious high heels
wrapped in waist coats & fashion statements that both conceal & reveal
so surreal, this post-Soviet spectacle
everyone suddenly a market receptacle
both raw & convoluted
both evolving & deeply rooted
i sip on vodka & sample the potatoes
stare at rye fields in endless rows
eye the birch forests & read of Chaubin's cosmic chaotic constructions
everywhere an eruption of repressed urges
what was purged in the past exists now in the present
so much twisting of the dogma till it no longer means what it once meant
so much is complicated but this much is evident:
new systems await old systems' descent...