Review: The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am very thankful to Dan to showing me this book, which would have had even more influence on me had I read it a few months earlier.

It is a Faust like story taking place in Russia with the Devil and his minions traveling through Moscow causing trouble and setting up multiple threads of peoples lives toward destruction or pain. Two characters are particularly effected and connected to a story traversing 2,000 years.

Reading this, I had been reminded how much I loved reading Russian literature which includes all matters of psychological issues and a manic/agitated pace which is indescribable elsewhere. I didn't give it 4 or 5 stars because I never felt particular sympathy for most of the characters, nor did I feel pain or relief when good things happened to them (maybe with the exception of Rimsky). Still a good iconic read.

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These Anthropological Synapses

My latest poem....



"These Anthropological Synapses"

Critical brain failure
a desire unquenchable
while repressed memory is unleashed

..yet the longing remains.

What I perceive as love is a damaged brain
coping with a memory of you
brilliant and formidable, beautiful and bold
burned into my existence with a searing fire

And I open myself to it

knowing it is material... mechanical

like the whirring of machines

chained in place as the sweatshop worker

Freedom would be a relief

an intensity mirrored by your own

lost are the stories, the teargas

the sensation of dark eyes and penetrating intelligence

Incidents, moments, milliseconds

interpreted through an algorithm

digesting culture, music, and danger

... the reality of struggle.

I can live in this heightened state

feeding off your memory

the silver spoon wrapped in dressings of poverty and contradiction

boundaries.... but walls too.

Echoes

There are echoes of the future in our rivers and trees
quietly stagnating in smoke and fire
drowning in profit, you can hear the strain
of stooped backs and urgent desire

The wind, it cries as the sounding alarms
a cascade of injustice and fear
awashed in poverty and mechanized tumult
while the forests...they just dissappear

Can you hear the echoes over backbreaking labor
of the rich condemning us all
or those trapped in prisons or covered in blood
waiting for the ax to fall

Ya Basta! Enough! yell the struggling masses
let the strike be your introduction
gather your neighbors and all people who work
and seize the means of production