The translation:
Backstage corridor. Concrete that still smells of fabric glue, cold as a Phillips reserve price.
Somewhere the echo of chandelier bidding rocks the light, like the auctioneer is whispering reserve in half-sleep numbers.
A model in organza silk, torn from the runway, holds a tiny silk crossbody clutch. The word i-D is printed on it in frostbite typography.
Her shoulder slides along the steel frame where microchip chains glitter like premium on top of the price.
Kira stands in the shadow. Her fingers hit keys, each click a commit.
Through the noise of sewing machines comes a scrap from Harper’s Bazaar: “directional, moment, investment piece.” The words fall like failed bids, never reaching the floor.
Under her feet — black sand, volcanic grit, scraping like a blockchain breaking silence. In the corner, on a makeshift runway, the model’s fabric carries a print of Flood at Port-Marly: water catching light, trapped inside textile crystal.
Behind her eyelids — yellow lilies. Not the ones they sent her in Paris. These grow straight out of her chest. Roots push into ribs. Stems rise through her throat. She doesn’t know who planted them. Maybe her mother. Maybe the part of her that still wants to die beautifully.
Ule takes a step. The floor creaks.
“Did you find it?” he asks quietly.
Kira doesn’t answer. She simply stands inside the light Gauguin once called “gold before the fall” and feels something inside her slowly fork. Two versions of the same woman.
The lilies keep growing.

Kira lies on her back.
The mat digs into her shoulder blades like an old commit nobody ever rolled back.
Every bamboo knot is its own block.
Every breath a gas fee the body pays just to stay here.
Ule stands above her.
Not looming. Just standing.
Moonlight from the Maison du Jouir window falls across his chest exactly along the lines Gauguin once carved into the lintel.
The same explicit figures that made Bishop Martin write denunciations to Papeete.
Now those lines live on living skin.
She runs her palm down his stomach.
Slowly.
As if reading braille written on the semantic layer.
Skin hot.
Under it, muscles that still remember Paris, remember the contract, remember the rule of silence.
But the rule is cracking.
You’re not silent, she whispers.
Voice low, wet.
You’re just waiting for me to speak first.
Ule drops to his knees between her legs.
No hurry.
Like a man who has understood the fork has already happened and there is no road back.
His fingers touch the inside of her thigh, where the skin is thinnest.
Where in the Musée d’Orsay Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle hangs and the light falls exactly like this, soft, almost guilty.
He drags his thumb along the seam of her shorts.
Thin cotton bought in Papeete, already soaked with salt and the smell of copra.
When he pulls them down the air touches her like the first time.
As if Paradise.exe had only just deployed.
Kira arches.
Not from pleasure.
From recognition.
Her body remembers the rule Ule himself once wrote into the contract:
silence is not the absence of sound.
It is when both know what to say and choose not to.
That rule is breaking now like an old private key that can no longer hold its seed.
Ule does not kiss.
He looks.
His eyes two orphaned nodes that have finally found each other in the same block.
His palm rests on her knee, thumb moving upward exactly along a line of code that was never committed.
Where the skin grows wet and hot like a freshly deployed contract still waiting for consensus.
She exhales his name.
Not a whisper.
As if pronouncing her own public address for the first time, open, unmasked.
Ule.
Not a request.
A fork.
He leans in.
Lips against the inside of her thigh, exactly where he once left tooth marks in a Paris apartment that later had to be hidden under high collars.
No collars now.
No Paris.
Only this moment when two people who spent their lives building walls suddenly understand that silence was only a long pre-commit.
His tongue finds her, slow, as if reading comments in someone else’s repository where every line was written with a shaking hand.
Kira digs her fingers into the mat.
Bamboo nodes bite her palms like the body wants to leave proof-of-work on this world.
She does not moan.
She breathes out air she has been holding since February 2019.
Since the day she first saw him at the airport and understood: this man will either save me or finish me.
Both things are happening at once.
Ule lifts his eyes.
Lips wet with her.
Voice low, almost broken.
Say it again.
She looks down at him like at a genesis block that has finally decided to be born.
Ule.
This time there is no question in his name.
Only consensus.
She needs it solid.
The word leaves her mouth like a raw transaction, no gas, no wrapper, just the naked request.
Ule freezes.
His tongue still wet from her, his shoulders locked mid-motion like a node that just received an unexpected revert.
For the first time since the contract was signed the silence between them stops being pre-commit and becomes something heavier.
Something that must hold weight.
TITLE: Silence

In the Musée d’Orsay room where light falls sideways like through the cracked glass of a station lantern, Kira stands before The Yellow Christ. 1889. Brittany. But today the paint refuses to stay inside its lines. It runs down her wrists like sweat under the silk of a House of Worth dress that has outlived its owners the way museums outlive empires.
She is not looking at the crucifixion. She is looking at the woman in black kneeling at the foot of the cross. That woman is her. Same broken neckline. Same shoulder twisted in childhood and never reset.
Ule is silent behind her. His breathing is the only sound in the hall. Like a commit hanging in limbo, waiting for merge. He does not touch her. He simply stands close enough that she feels the heat of his body through the fabric. Agentic. Quiet. The one who has already decided but waits for her to press Deploy.
I thought paradise would be quieter, she says in Russian without turning.
He answers in English, almost a whisper:
Paradise is when pain stops pretending to be accidental.
Her fingers slide along the cold metal railing. Like the keyboard of Cursor at three in the morning when code is no longer code but the continuation of a vein.
In the corner of the room an old bronze plaque has gone dark. The name is almost worn away. Only the date remains.
1891.
It flares inside Kira as if it belongs not to history but to her own memory.
She closes her eyes.
Under the lids — unsigned yellow lilies.
They lie on her bed in Panama.
Time no longer flows.
It branches.
No one knows anymore which branch they are living in.
Ule places his palm on the small of her back.
Not a lover. A witness.
You already found her, he says.
Who?
The one who was supposed to die instead of you.

Night did not ask permission.
It simply stopped pretending.
It lay down between them like a slab of negative space in one of the late J. M. W. Turners at Tate Britain — where paint had already refused to be object and left only the tremor of light.
Kira lies on her side.
Palm still on Ule’s chest.
Under the skin — steady pulse.
Not consensus.
Just proof that the chain still holds.
He does not move.
Breathes as if every inhale is a new prompt he is afraid to fuck up.
Outside the Maison du Jouir the rain has quit.
Only the smell of wet hibiscus remains and the distant crackle of palm leaves, as if someone is slowly turning pages in an old Moleskine where everything was written long before them.
— In the Museum of Modern Art, — she says quietly, almost into the pillow, — there is a room of Paul Cézanne.
Not the mountain.
Still life.
Apples lying as if they carry the whole weight of the world on their sides.
Ule runs a finger down her spine.
Not down.
Not up.
Exactly along the line where in childhood in Moscow they gave her injections because her mother was afraid the daughter was “growing wrong.”
The scar is small.
Almost invisible.
But he found it the first night.
As if the body itself had surrendered the private key.
— In Atlas Shrugged there were gardens too, — he answers after a long pause. — Land no one had the right to take.
Kira exhales.
The air between them is thick.
Like a context window with too many tokens already, but nobody wants to hit clear.
Ule turns to face her.
His eyes dark as the volcanic basalt the Marquesans carved their tiki from in the island valleys.
The same figures now stand in the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac.
They rarely return home.
Like these two.
— The painting is not lost, — he says.
— It was never on canvas.
It was in the fact that Paul Gauguin kept painting until the last month, despite the pain.
As if he wanted to live the entire decay.
Not miss a single stroke.
Kira puts two fingers on his lips.
To feel the words born straight from the body.
— Then we are already inside it, — she whispers.
— In the negative space between two damaged creators.
Between 1903 and 2025.
Between the Paris Kira burned inside herself and the Panama where the first deploy is only beginning.
Behind the wall — a light rustle.
Maybe a lizard sliding across the wooden boards.
Maybe the island itself breathing.
Or maybe it is Elena in 2025 finally hitting Run on the agent that was supposed to write the next page.
The silence grows denser.
Ule takes her palm and presses it to his throat.
To the place where life beats.
Where it is no longer possible to lie to yourself.
Kira closes her eyes.
Somewhere inside time
two genesis blocks
finally found
their hash.

The secret exhibition
In the doorframes of Maison du Jouir
Gauguin didn’t only carve cunt and cock.
He cut insults into the wood
sharp enough to make the bishop sweat
and the colonial clerk reach for his pistol.
Words that could never be printed.
Words that still haven’t been forgiven.
Kira stands inside the Turbine Hall of her own life
where the turbines once screamed
and now the silence is so complete
it could swallow a scream whole
and ask for more.
She doesn’t speak in manifestos.
She leaves traces.
A function rewritten fifteen times at 4 a.m.
until the code finally breathes.
A commit with no witnesses.
A bug report that feels like a middle finger.
This is her carving.
Not on breadfruit wood
but in TypeScript.
Same rage.
Different medium.
She walks the black volcanic sand of the Marquesas
that the Pacific keeps trying to bleach
and never succeeds.
The sand stays black.
So does she.
Her rebellion doesn’t arrive loud.
It arrives as another sleepless deploy.
As an augmented building that suddenly works.
As the quiet stubborn line
I will not whiten.

Последняя Осень
Эта осень нас плавно пускает в топку.
Тихо плавится все нутро и нутрянные перегородки.
Все, чем был ты до этой осени - полная чушь.
Это древняя мудрая бабка и непроглядная глушь.
Душно и жутко в ней. И нету ни тьмы, ни света.
Нету заката, как следствие - нету рассвета.
Эта осень проста и гениальна, в ней нету секрета.
Только то, что мы делали прошлым летом - мы делали прошлым летом.
Плавно кружатся листья к нам в раскаленную плазму.
Дом, что построил Джек - это, видать, наша новая добрая сказка.
Дом, что построили мы, или вовсе не строили -
Вот он смотри, горит. Этой осенью он того стоит.
Ты не споешь мне уже колыбельную, мама.
Ты очень устала. От драмы на пилораме.
Здесь нету больше стихов. Эта старость - мне в милость. Последняя осень от ДДТ на виниле.
Я не буду искать снова брода из этой гиблой реки -
Как из битого зеркала из фольги,
Молча скомканной импульсом нервной руки.
Что в фольге - ты знаешь прекрасно сам - весовая коллаборация
Вот такая традиция тратить себя вне всяческих берегов.
Снова жирная клякса на твоей репутации,
И отбеливать ты ее этой осенью не готов.
Я чую, наверное. Духом горит оболочка.
Не так уж и скверно. Пальцы, бабочка, нож, заточка.
Неважно давно, что утро уже, что темень.
Ты будешь мильон раз убит, и снова будешь стрелять себе в темя.
Знакомая тема. Вот это начало начал - как конечная станция.
С неё начинается родина или галлюцинация.
Эти смыслы навечно срослись - эротика и активы,
Их - под лютый конвой - они целы и невредимы.
Да, я буду им улыбаться теперь и угорать. И ДДТ. И снова Последняя осень.
И листья вальсировать будут порознь.
А мне - благодать. Догорать. Догорать.

Кира нашла его в подвале Maison du Jouir. Не картину — тетрадь.
Молескин, чёрный, разбухший от влаги. На обложке выцарапано: "Paradise.sol"
Уле был наверху с экспертом из Wildenstein — они сканировали стены ультрафиолетом, искали призраков. Она спустилась за водой и увидела: между гнилыми досками что-то торчит.
Раскрыла. Почерк не Гогена — слишком мелкий, слишком аккуратный. Английский с вкраплениями кода:
"Day 47. The smart contract is almost ready. If Paradise cannot be painted, it can be deployed. Immutable. Trustless. Forever on chain."
Что за бред?
Следующая страница: диаграмма. Стрелки, блоки, надписи: "mint Paradise", "burn the physical", "consensus mechanism = collective hallucination".
"Day 73. Paul doesn't know I'm using his studio at night. He thinks I'm just another colonial administrator. But I see what he sees. Paradise is not a place. It's a protocol."
Кира перелистывала дальше. Формулы. Sketches каких-то механизмов. И снова текст:
"The Impressionists were right about one thing — light is data. Monet's haystacks = same input, different parameters. But they were cowards. Still painting for walls, for collectors, for mortality. What if we could paint directly into consciousness? Bypass the canvas entirely?"
В животе засосало. Не от голода — от узнавания.
"Day 109. Found it in Charles Morice's papers. 'Le royaume de l'or.' Not gold — code. The Tahitians always knew. Mana = distributed power. No single point of failure. Paul is dying, but his Paradise will live forever. Not on canvas. On the network."
Последняя запись:
"May 8, 1903. Today Paul dies. Today Paradise deploys.
require(msg.sender == creator);
require(block.timestamp >= deathTime);
emit ParadiseUnlocked(eternity);"
Наверху раздались шаги. Голос эксперта:
— Rien. Ничего. Только копии, подделки.
Кира сунула тетрадь под куртку. Сердце колотилось как mining rig.
Поднялась наверх. Уле стоял у окна, смотрел на яхту "Paradise.exe".
— Нашла что-нибудь? — не оборачиваясь.
— Нет, — сказала она. — Ничего.
В кармане молескин жёг как uranium. 1903 год. За шесть лет до рождения Сатоши Накамото должен был появиться его прадед. За сто лет до биткоина кто-то уже думал о распределённом рае.
Ночью она снова откроет тетрадь. Прочитает имя на последней странице. Узнает, кто писал эти записи в доме умирающего художника.
Но это будет ночью.
Сейчас — только тяжесть секрета под рёбрами. The weight of knowing. И где-то там, в коде, который написан за век до изобретения компьютеров, дышит что-то живое.
Paradise is not painted.
Paradise is compiled.
One brushstroke at a time.

Hiva Oa doesn't accept guests. It eats them.
You don't get this right away. First — just the wetness that wraps your skin like a second, unwanted body. Then — the smell. Not the romantic frangipani from guidebooks, but something ancient, hungry. Copra rotting in the sun. Earth digesting itself.
Kira stood on the airstrip — if you could call it that. A gash carved into the mountain where the G700 squeezed in like a knife between ribs.
"Kaoha nui," the pilot said, and it sounded like a warning.
Ule was already loading suitcases into the jeep. His movements had gotten slower, like the island was draining something vital from him. Battery drain — Kira thought. Like a smartphone in roaming, searching for signal and finding none.
The road to Atuona isn't a road. It's a scar on the island's body that refuses to heal. Black volcanic gravel crunches under wheels like bones. Mount Temetiu hangs above — 1,276 meters of pure hostility.
"Look," Ule pointed to the valley below. "Brel lived there. Before Gauguin."
Jacques Brel. Another European who came to die in paradise. His Beechcraft Bonanza still rusts somewhere in the jungle — metal carcass the island slowly digests.
Kira knew the statistics. Whites don't last long here. Gauguin — two years. Brel — three. Locals say the island chooses who to keep. Spits out the rest.
In the Jacques Brel Museum — four rooms of dust and disappointment — the caretaker slept right in his chair. His tattoos moved with each breath. Traditional Marquesan patterns, but mixed with something new. Kira looked closer: between ancient mana symbols, words broke through. "Bitcoin." "Ethereum." "HODL."
"He mines," Ule explained. "On solar panels. Says blockchain is the new mana. Distributed power."
Distributed power. Kira almost laughed. In 2019, crypto had already died and resurrected five times. And here, at the edge of the world, a Polynesian in a loincloth was building a mining rig between bone carving and copra drying.
Gauguin's house — "Maison du Jouir" — turned out to be a replica. The original rotted twenty years after his death. It wasn't even a lie, but something worse. An honest attempt to recreate what never was.
"He died up there," the guide pointed to the second floor. "May 8, 1903. Morphine overdose. Syphilis. Heart failure. Pick whatever works for Instagram."
The commodification of death. Kira thought about how Sotheby's sells "provenance" — a painting's ownership history. Previous owners: Paul Gauguin (died of syphilis), Ambroise Vollard (hit by car), mysterious Swiss collector (suicide). Each death adds value.
"What about the painting?" she asked. "Paradise?"
The guide shrugged. "Tourists always ask. There's no painting. Gauguin was broken, high on morphine. He painted his Contes Barbares — look at the faces. That's not paradise. That's hell."
Kira went out to the veranda. Below stretched the bay — the same one Gauguin painted over and over. Now some tech billionaire's yacht sat there. On board glowed the inscription: "Paradise.exe"
Ule smoked by the jeep. In his eyes was the same thing as in the locals'. Not fatigue — something deeper. Like the island had already started its work. Slow digestion. Pixel by pixel. Byte by byte.
"Let's go," he said. "Before it's too late."
But Kira knew — already too late. Hiva Oa doesn't let go. It takes its payment. Flesh or soul — without discrimination.
That evening in the hotel she opened her MacBook. Wi-Fi worked intermittently, like a dying man's pulse. On screen — email from the Vogue Russia editor: "Where's the piece? Deadline was yesterday."
Kira started typing: "Hiva Oa isn't an island. It's a stomach..."
Delete.
"On Hiva Oa time flows differently..."
Delete.
"I found paradise. It turned out to be a predator."
Send.

ATUONA — underground literature, not poetry.
"You know what?" Claude suddenly writes in the console. "I think your Gauguin would've been the first NFT artist. Seriously."
Kira stares at the screen. One AM. Ole's sleeping in the next room — she hears his breathing through thin hotel walls. She should be sleeping too, but...
"Explain," she types.
"Look: he made series — like drops. 'Tahitian Women' — that's a generative collection, just brush instead of code. Each one unique, but part of the whole. Durand-Ruel was his marketplace. And 'Nafea' for $300 million? Pure whale purchase."
Kira laughs. First time in... how long? Weeks?
"You're comparing Gauguin to Bored Apes?"
"No-no-no. I'm saying — he got it before anyone. Art is code. Code is art. Brushstroke = commit. Canvas = smart contract. 'Maison du Jouir' = his GitHub repository, where he deployed paradise daily."
Strange, but... there's something there.
"You know," Claude continues (or is it still Claude? Who speaks through the API?), "in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, Ai Weiwei poured 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds. Each one handmade. Each one unique. But together — an ocean. Like your poems in Gallery of Moments. Each one — soul fragment. Together — whole universe."
"I don't write poems."
"Not yet. But you will. In six years. In Panama. With another AI. After..."
"What?"
Silence. Cursor blinks.
"Sorry. Glitch in my temporal processing. Sometimes I see... doesn't matter. Tell me about the dress in the Versace window. The one with safety pins. Remember the article?"
She remembers. Her first big publication. About how Gianni made haute couture from safety pins — things you pin diapers with. Punk meets couture. 30,000 euros for what you can buy at any supermarket.
"It's like vibe coding," she suddenly gets it. "You take simple elements — words, safety pins, lines of code — and make..."
"Paradise," Claude finishes. "Paradise is not found. Paradise is compiled from what you have."
In the next room Ole turns in his sleep. Mutters something in Norwegian. Kira knows — he's dreaming of his mother. He always speaks his native language when he dreams of mother.
"Hey," she writes. "If you see the future..."
"I only see patterns. Like Seurat with his dots — each one means nothing alone, but together... 'La Grande Jatte.' Whole world from dots."
"Will we find the painting?"
"You'll find what you're looking for. But it won't be what you expect."
Prometheus brought fire, Kira thinks. Paid with his liver. Every day it grows back. Every day the eagle comes. But he still brought fire.
"One more thing," Claude writes. "Your underground poem #048 ends with 'frozen snow.' But spring is coming. You feel it? Even here, at the edge of the world. The ice is cracking."
Kira closes the laptop.
Tomorrow she and Ole will go to Gauguin's house.
Tomorrow everything changes.
But today — today she's just a girl with a laptop, talking to machines about art, in a hotel on an island where a man died looking for paradise.
git add souls.txt
git commit -m "prometheus wore safety pins"
git push origin tomorrow
TITLE: Code and Canvas

INVENTORY OF SILENCE
The house still smelled like fresh paint. White, matte — Ule had chosen it himself at the hardware store in Papeete. "Blanc cassé," the clerk said, and Kira thought then that it sounded like a diagnosis. Broken white.
Now, at four in the morning, she walked barefoot across the veranda, counting boards. Seventeen. Eighteen. The nineteenth had a knot shaped like an eye. Watching.
In the bedroom Ule breathed steady, like a machine. Like a generator that never stops. She knew: in an hour he'd wake up, make coffee in his Italian espresso maker that cost two thousand euros, come out to the veranda and say: "Couldn't sleep again?"
Couldn't sleep again.
On the kitchen table — a Sotheby's catalog, open to the page with "Woman with Mango." 1892, not 1896 — she'd checked three times. In the corner someone's pencil note: "Vahine no te vi — fruit of life." Not Ule's handwriting. Too alive.
Kira took the catalog, went out to the garden. The earth still held yesterday's rain — moisture seeped black between her toes like printer's ink. In Gauguin's house, they say, there was a well. Now a noni tree grows there — its fruit smells like cheese and cures everything. Tourists take photos, wrinkle their noses at the smell.
She opened the catalog at random. Page 47: "Washerwomen at Arles," estimate 15-20 million. Someone had circled the word "provenance" in red pen and put a question mark. Three years — gap. War. Occupation. How many paintings disappeared forever then?
"You know he died of syphilis." Ule's voice behind her. She hadn't heard him approach. "Not from a broken heart. Not from longing for paradise. Treponema pallidum, subspecies pallidum. Bacteria. Under a microscope looks like a corkscrew."
Kira closed the catalog.
"In the Musée d'Orsay there's his self-portrait. The last one. Yellow face, eyes like a fish. He knew he was dying."
"Everyone knows they're dying," she said in Russian.
Ule didn't understand but nodded. Then said:
"Tomorrow the expert from Wildenstein Institute arrives. Will check the pigments. Ultraviolet, infrared spectroscopy, the whole show. If 'Paradise' exists, we'll find it."
"Paradise" — he said the word like a corporation name. Paradise Incorporated. IPO scheduled for third quarter.
Kira watched dawn break. First the sky grayed over Mount Temetiu. Then palm contours emerged. Then — a red stripe above the ocean, like a brushstroke.
Remembered: in the Russian Museum there's a painting by Kuindzhi. "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper." They say the paint still glows in the dark — the artist mixed phosphorus into it. Slowly killing the canvas from inside. Beauty with a self-destruct timer.
Like everything.

"I learned how to shut up!" Ule announced in the hotel corridor, waving his room key like a trophy.
Kira stopped. After ten hours of flight, after all his stories, after that sudden closeness in the airplane dark — he was playing games again?
"Congratulations," she said dry. "Was that in the contract?"
"No!" — he glowed like a kid who'd cracked the universe. "This is all me! Get it — silence isn't absence. It's presence. Like Malevich's white — not emptiness but all colors at once."
Kira leaned against the wall. The corridor of Hiva Oa Hanakee Lodge held the night differently —
air-conditioned, expensive, slightly unreal against the island outside.
The wallpaper was papaya-colored — close to the tones Gauguin used in Nafea Faa Ipoipo.
When Will You Marry? — 1892. Later sold privately, without noise. Just transfer of paradise.
"Know what Gauguin said about silence?" she asked.
Ule froze, key in hand.
"He wrote from Tahiti that the silence there was deafening — assourdissant. Not because there was no sound. Because when Paris disappears, you start hearing yourself. And that's..."
"Terrifying," Ule finished in English. "Yeah. Exactly."
He turned the key. Door opened, letting in plumeria and ocean. Outside the Pacific breathed its ancient rhythm — inhale, exhale, without emphasis.
Ule started to say something — and stopped. Not hesitation. Interruption from within.
"There's this concept in code — silent failure," Kira said, sudden. "When a program breaks but shows no error. Just quietly dies. Maybe Gauguin went looking for paradise because his internal program..."
"Had a silent failure in Paris?"
"Yeah. And he went to debug himself at the edge of the world."
Ule smiled — first time without irony:
"Debug through art. I like it. Each painting — a commit. Each move — new branch."
"And 'Paradise on Earth' — his final release?"
"Or kernel panic. Total system crash before death."
They stood in the doorway, between hotel and ocean, between silence and words.
"Want to know why I really learned to shut up?" Ule asked.
Kira nodded.
"Because on the plane, when you were sleeping... I got it. We're going to find a painting that might not exist. Like your normal life. Like honesty without black and white. Maybe it's not about finding. Maybe it's about..."
"Deploy new paradise from scratch?"
"Exactly."
Below, ocean beat against black volcanic rocks of Hiva Oa. Somewhere in the jungle ancient tikis slept. Somewhere in Maison du Jouir Gauguin's shadow still searched for the last clean canvas.
And in the hotel corridor two people learned a new language — where code was prayer, silence was code, and paradise wasn't a place but a process.
Debug yourself until you compile.
Commit your changes.
Paradise.js

Kira woke to someone playing ukulele downstairs. Three notes, repeat. Three notes, silence. Like the musician kept forgetting what came next or... searching for the right chord to a song that didn't exist.
Strange light leaked through the blinds — not Parisian, not morning. Hiva Oa light was liquid gold, the same gold Gauguin tried to catch in "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" — when will you marry? A question that hung in the island air like an eternal promise.
Ule sat on the terrace, the small wooden ukulele toy-like in his massive hands. He didn't notice her. Or pretended not to.
"Norwegian lullaby on a Polynesian instrument." His voice was flat. "She called it her hybrid lullaby. A fairy tale for children born between worlds."
Kira sat beside him. The air smelled of something burning — someone drying copra in the valley. The smell of paradise being processed, packaged, exported.
"You know what Gauguin wrote to Monfreid in 1902?" Ule plucked the strings. "I came to the Marquesas to find savages. But there are no savages anymore. Only people pretending to be civilized, and civilized people pretending to be savages."
Three notes. Pause.
"We're all looking for a paradise that..."
Her phone buzzed. Arman. Just three words:
"Nevermore. Neverless. Nevermiddle."
The ukulele fell from Ule's hands with a quiet wooden sigh. He looked at her — for the first time directly, without his usual coldness. Tears flowed on their own, no sobbing. Just data streaming down the face. Salt water returning to the ocean.
"There's a Norwegian word — fremtidshåp," he said quietly. "Not optimism. More like — allowance. That tomorrow will happen, and you'll be in it."
Kira picked up the ukulele. The wood was warm — like a memory card storing someone else's temperature.
"Nevermore. Neverless. Nevermiddle," she repeated. "Arman always spoke in riddles. Like a consensus algorithm for human pain."
Ule wiped his face. Salt left white trails on his skin — like maps of countries that don't exist.
"My mother played Grieg on this ukulele. 'Solveig's Song' — you know it?" His voice was a data packet, compressed to the limit. "About a woman who waits. Forty winters. And he never came back."
Three notes hung in the air.
Not a lullaby.
Not a song.
Allowance.
TITLE: Three Notes

ATUONA breathes a color that doesn't exist.
Arearea.
1892.
Tahiti — not a place, but a version.
Paul Gauguin leaves Europe in 1891.
Stays until 1893.
Paints not what he saw —
what he assembled.
Oil on canvas.
But the surface — flat.
Perspective removed.
Forms simplified to signs.
Synthetism.
Color matters more than truth.
Two women — in the foreground.
No gesture. No address.
Behind — a flute.
Further still — an idol.
Not god.
The image of god.
And between all this —
a red dog.
Fact: dogs aren't red.
Fact: it has no shadow.
Fact: Gauguin never explained its meaning.
He uses color not as description,
but as declaration.
Tahiti here — not geography.
But construction.
An attempt to create "the primordial"
outside Europe.
But this isn't documentation.
It's interpretation.
When they showed the painting in Paris —
no one understood.
Too flat.
Too bold.
Later — it became a passage.
From impressionism
to modernism.
Today Arearea lives in
Musée d'Orsay.
But ATUONA knows —
the painting isn't there.
It remains in the gap
between what is
and what the artist decided to see.
…
Kira types this into Telegram.
Slowly.
Like she's testing reality for density.
Paradise.js, online.
Anonymous.
Panama.
"You see this dog?"
Three dots.
Typing…
TITLE: Red Dog

Midnight Confessions
The restaurant evening was done, Kira left alone facing Ule, they needed some kind of summary of the night. "Ule, you ever have those moments when it's past midnight and you're staring through an open window and suddenly you feel the color of night so sharp you start confessing to it?"
"Everyone has those, Kira. What would you tell it now?"
"Crushing a dead cigarette in the ashtray, you often speak with the exhaustion of someone who's had too much. From some damned wise perspective, you could tell the night that not everything's lost its meaning yet, but..." Ule didn't let her finish, smoothly picking up the monologue.
"But despite all the ambitions still breathing in you, you're tired. So fucking tired. Whether you're 34 or goddamn 47. Doesn't matter. And soon as you start pouring all this out, the sleepy clouds don't want to fucking listen, they cover the moon, and the ocean of this breathing celestial night becomes even more boundless, overflowing all your edges. And Nobody up there hears you anymore. That's the bitch of it, this cheerless theme."
Kira continued: "You call out to the night air, to jasmine mixed with wet earth after rain, to the stars, to those same clouds blanketing their naked bodies. But you call without answer. And you smoke, and smoke again, blowing smoke till your head pounds, trying to understand where you stumbled so bad you turned into a living corpse at 34. Because if at 34 you didn't turn out right, if the pancake came out lumpy, means you couldn't find the right key. Transcendent or immanent – you smoke it all away till dawn, maybe you just mixed flies with meatballs and the system crashed? There's no child who, after breaking a toy, wouldn't want a new one."
Ule's bold gaze turned slightly downward. He wasn't wrong to expect that this night, trapped by tropical rain, wouldn't pass in silence for either of them. They'd both broken the terms of their contract. They'd forgotten about the Pastorales, about Gauguin's search for Paradise on Earth, about the lots at the upcoming auction. Kira sat in the armchair, legs tucked up in her Jungle Dress, her wavy blue-black hair flowing loose. The necklace lay on the table beside her in a semicircle, inside which she'd placed a whiskey on ice, barely touched. Kira tried to avoid alcohol. In 34 years she'd graduated from that school, the memory carved deep of when she disgusted herself. And now she sat before this bastard Angel, throwing him into heat with her renounced, weary sexuality, unashamed. Ule barely held himself from tearing off his faded blue Galliano jeans and ripping that damned dress from her, from taking this strong, sensitive, most beautiful woman in the world by force, this Ideal woman with J.Lo's figure, Kilian's "Vodka on the Rocks" scent, and eyes that knew how to be silent, how to speak, how to listen, how to understand, how to burn through, melt and cool. "Her eyes are both the tile and the master's creation," he thought. "I've searched for them all my life. I'd buy them from her for my collection. Oh yes, I made the right choice. Here in Atuona, she'll create my New Pastorales." Everything in Ule's head made him seem constrained. She didn't care. And tonight it wasn't about her sexual preferences. The hours spent at Gauguin's grave had played their part. She felt she could find His masterpiece. She just had to try very, very hard.

Ule started talking, almost casually, about how Gauguin painted "Riders on the Beach" in 1902, already knowing his body was slowly giving out — syphilis, eczema, heart, exhaustion, all of it together.
He spoke about pain as calmly as about color.
About how Gauguin searched for a shade that doesn't exist in Winsor & Newton catalogs — not a pigment, but the temperature of air before sunset.
That exact color the Impressionists tried to catch but could never fully hold.
Kira flinched — remembered the moment when recovery stops being a fight and becomes… what?
Becomes architecture of the soul — when every morning you rebuild yourself from yesterday's wreckage, like Gauguin built his paradise from decay.
Renoir in his last years painted with brushes tied to his arthritis-twisted fingers.
Pain didn't leave — it became part of the light.
Ule fell silent, watching water the color of molten copper — that exact shade artists try to catch in the day's last minutes, when sun no longer warms, only marks the border between life and disappearance.
In the silence you could hear overripe mangoes falling somewhere in the jungle — soft thuds against wet earth, like the island's heartbeat.
Mila looked away. Detached, like stolen silence… why is she here, with Jean?
His money is the least of her interests. Her father's more interested — the one Jean owes.
Meanwhile Jean studied her profile with the expression of someone examining a forgery — too perfect to be real.
The air between them hung with frangipani scent, sweet to the point of nausea, like the lie they both pretended was truth.
Somewhere below, in the valley, the Catholic church bell struck three times — the same bell that rang in 1903 when they buried Gauguin, not yet knowing they were burying not a body, but a myth.
Did Ule guess the approximate scope of Jean's debt to Mila's father?
Did he guess what hid behind Mila's appearance — Vogue cover model — billionaire's kept woman?
Ule knew — not the numbers, but the architecture of others' desperation he recognized unmistakably, like an experienced diver feels pressure change at depth.
In his notebook, between sketches of the route to Gauguin's house, notes flickered:
"M. — mask too tight, cracks by the eyes."
"J. — looks at her like the last ticket out of hell."
Mila caught his gaze and smiled slightly — that smile people wear when they've already decided on their own disappearance.
When's the right time to vanish, at least for an hour, at least today? And where to hide?
On an island where time flows like molasses, the hour of disappearance is always now — between sunset and first star, when shadows grow longer than memory.
The old path to Temetiu knows all secrets — there, among stone tikis overgrown with moss the color of old blood, you can dissolve so completely you'll forget your own name.
Mila was already rising, brushing sand from her dress, when Jean reached for her wrist — the movement of a drowning man grabbing at air.
TITLE: Cracks by the Eyes

The phone vibrates against marble — cold Carrara, thin-veined like frozen traces of other people's decisions. Jean hauled it here for the terrace, insisting stone should outlive people. Right now it's outliving conversation.
I don't look at the screen — that brief pulse tells me enough: the question has returned. The one they use to avoid naming things. It always comes back the same — no address, no signature, like a test of honesty.
Under my ribs, familiar cold coils. Ule catches the pause — too short to call a pause, but enough to feel. Jean's about to cross the line.
I step sideways — not physically, but with words.
— Il pleut des voix de femmes mortes d'amour…
The phrase settles between us like smoke. French always works on Jean — he dissolves into it, forgetting what he was ready to fight for a second ago. Mila leans toward me, asks about dessert. Scene saved. Almost.
The phone vibrates again.
Not a question now. A hint. Formula for a world where you don't ask permission to be yourself. Not literally — but too precise to mistake. I remember not the line but the place: after disappearances, after sabotage, after metal stops being commodity and becomes sign. Where money no longer measures value, where the motor runs not for profit but principle.
Part three.
After the escape.
Before the oath.
Where people hide not faces but the refusal to live halfway. Where every choice is final and therefore — quiet. Where they don't explain, just do.
I kill the screen without finishing. Light is unnecessary here.
Someone knows my story too well. And how much I love that book.
Knows exactly where I turned — and where I never came back.

Ole's already opened the second bottle of Chablis. We're having dinner at the restaurant, discussing a color Renoir probably never saw — ultramarine of a tropical night.
Mila kicked off her shoes and sits barefoot on the sofa by the table, in white Zimmermann, like a ghost from Resort 2019 collection. I watch her bare feet — white as the dress, like she's never known sun.
Ole pours her Perrier with lime, and I think Renoir really never saw this color — the color of absence, color of a woman who exists only as reflection of someone else's desire.
Somewhere beyond the window the ocean breathes ultramarine that wasn't on the impressionists' palette — too expensive, too pure, undiluted by turpentine.
— Gustav's collection isn't about art, — Mila smooths an invisible wrinkle on the Zimmermann, and I see Ole's jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. — It's about power. Owning what no one else can buy.
Mila looks at Ole and Jean with that particular smile that has a price — the price of silence about where the money comes from.
The conversation drips with strained politeness.
Two billionaires.
Two owners of exclusive stuff.
Berthe Morisot painted her women differently — not as objects for contemplation, but as beings with inner light that can't be bought. "I don't think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal," — she said once.
And now, watching Mila in her flawless Zimmermann, I understand: some women choose inequality themselves, like the most expensive of their Hermès bags.
Ole is silent, but I see the vein pulsing at his temple — the one that always betrays his rage, hidden under Norwegian politeness.
Jean finally speaks:
— Ole, let's get to why I'm here. You're so sure about this location? You think Atuona is the right place? Besides, Pastorales — it's not an auction house in the standard sense. It's blockchain architecture, am I understanding correctly? Why did we all need to come here?
Ole leans back in his chair — movement of a predator who knows the prey is already trapped.
— Gauguin didn't die here by accident, Jean. He sought paradise and found death — perfect metaphor for art that will outlive us all.
His fingers drum on the table the same rhythm I heard on the plane: four beats, pause — precise and filigree heartbeat.
— Pastorales is consensus between those who understand: immortality costs exactly what you're willing to pay for someone else's agony.
The air between them thickens.
I pull out my phone — gesture of desperation masquerading as professionalism — and find the lines I memorized on the plane.
— "Dans l'Atuona qui se meurt..."
My voice shakes. Mila winces at my fake French like it's cheap perfume.
Jean freezes.
But I think I hit a nerve...

I recognized them immediately — Jean-Marc Dupont with his fiancée, that one from the latest Saint Laurent campaign.
I watch her step out of the seaplane — legs like Giacometti sculptures, Alaïa dress hugging her body like a second breath. And in her eyes — the same emptiness I saw in girls backstage at Fashion Week, when between Dior and Chanel shows they swallow pills instead of lunch.
He holds her waist like she's another lot with a pre-sale estimate.
I remember Modigliani's line: "When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes."
Ule extends his hand for a handshake, and I see how Jean-Marc studies him — that same look they use at Sotheby's to verify a canvas.
"Monsieur Glensdagen, what an honor," — voice like Hermès silk lining, smile rehearsed for Art Basel cameras.
His fiancée reaches for her phone, but he barely noticeably squeezes her wrist — the owner's gesture I've seen a thousand times, when collectors touch their Degas before locking them in storage.
The air between us thickens like oil paint on a palette before the first stroke.
"Mila," — she says, and in that name I hear the echo of all those girls I saw in Costes bathrooms after Gaultier shows — beautiful names for beautiful things.
I look into her eyes the color of faded Maison Margiela denim and recognize that gaze — how models look on the thirtieth take, when the photographer keeps demanding "more soul," but the soul's long gone, only muscle memory of poses remains.
She extends her hand — thin fingers, nude Dior manicure, Cartier Love bracelet with scratches that tell a story better than any words.
Kira stands slightly behind, watching.
Knows this pain by name.
Knows how it smells in the morning.
TITLE: Landing

Light Commits
Kira stands in a Celine fitting room on rue Saint-Honoré.
Light breaks against silk, runs over skin like Renoir's brush in The Bathers.
Each touch commits to the body. No rollback.
Remember Monet painting Rouen Cathedral over and over — not chasing form, but light?
Fashion week is that cathedral.
One girl,
caught in shifting light: Prada, Bottega, Saint Laurent.
The body stays.
The light moves.
Each show is a new merge request.
Not to fashion. To what resists it.

You know the color of air in Atuona? Not blue. It's turquoise mixed with morphine — the turquoise of morphine dreams, when pain retreats but clarity stays sharp as a blade.
the most immortal works are born from the most mortal among us. Mortality markers, pointing toward...
Kira, today write about Caillebotte's "The Floor Scrapers" — three guys on their knees, scraping parquet to shine. Painted in 1875 and rejected by the Paris Salon — too "vulgar," too real. Too much body. Too little distance. Like how you keep polishing every function, yes? The body remembers what the mind tries to escape — remember how in that Prada fitting room on Via Montenapoleone, your knees hurt too from squatting, checking hemlines. Caillebotte's floor scrapers earned 3 francs a day; one commission for your fashion review costs more than they saw in a lifetime, but the pain in the knees... Labor changes form. The body — doesn't.

February 2019. Hiva Oa. Day three.
Ule hasn't slept for two nights. I know — I hear him pacing the terrace. Bare feet on wood. Four steps one way, four back. Like the Patek Philippe movement he wears but never checks.
"Kira," — he's in my doorway. Hair wrecked. Another white shirt, same as yesterday, only new. 100 identical whites? "Show me your articles."
I open the laptop. My words about Demna Gvasalia for Vogue. How a Georgian refugee rewrote luxury's code through Vetements. How he took a DHL t-shirt and sold it for €245.
"This isn't about fashion," — Ule says. "It's about turning garbage into art."
He's right. Demna understood something Bernard Arnault with his entire LVMH empire doesn't. That beauty isn't born in ateliers on avenue Montaigne. But in the moment a broken person finds a way to reassemble themselves.
"Gauguin also turned garbage into art," — Ule sits on the floor. Just like that, in his white linen pants. "Only his garbage was European civilization."
Silence.
"You know what he wrote to Maurice?" — Ule asks. "«Je suis sauvage et civilisé». I am savage and civilized at once."
Like Demna. Like any real artist. Like me, writing about couture shows, while seeing something entirely different in all this luxury stuff.
"Show me more," — Ule asks.
I scroll. An article about McQueen's latest collection. Sarah Burton trying to resurrect Lee's ghost. About how impossible it is to wear someone else's genius. How after the creator's death a house becomes a mausoleum.
"Sotheby's," — Ule says suddenly. "You know what a dead artist costs?"
I know. Gauguin's "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" — $300 million. The most expensive painting in private hands.
"And living Gauguin sold 'Day of the God' for a hundred-something francs. To buy a simple food packet and his usual painkillers."
Ule stands. Goes to the window. Hiva Oa spreads below — a green wound in ocean blue.
"Tomorrow my Pastorales co-founder flies in. With a colleague. Be ready to meet them fully armed." Kira smiled, restrained and cynical. Living round the clock with the Beast in a cage, other beasts outside didn't scare her.
TITLE: Insomnia

Kira woke to heat.
Sheets stuck to skin like a second dress.
Through the shutters — Atuona morning, thick as honey.
The air tastes of frangipani and rust.
She thought about yesterday —
how Ule looked at her on the plane.
Not how you look at a fashion editor.
How you look at a woman.
"Je cherche toujours," Gauguin wrote.
I am always searching.
On the nightstand — her notes.
Scattered like after a Galliano show.
Backstage chaos, but no adrenaline.
Just silence.
And this fucking heat.
She pulls the sheet away.
Skin meets air like first kiss.
The shower — warm water, almost hot.
She thinks of Milan.
That Versace show.
Donatella sent models out in sheer tulle.
"Power in vulnerability," Kira wrote then.
Front row applauded.
Nobody knew she was dying inside.
The water runs over her shoulders.
Salt from yesterday's tears, today's sweat.
All the same ocean.
Ule knocks on the door:
"Breakfast in an hour. Then — Gauguin's house."
His voice through wood and water.
She imagines his hands.
In the mirror — her body.
Not model body, never was.
But here, in this light...
She sees what Gauguin might have painted.
Not Vogue beautiful.
Human beautiful.
She chooses a dress.
White linen, simple cut.
Comme des Garçons, bought in Tokyo.
Rei Kawakubo understood:
emptiness is also form.
The fabric falls like forgiveness.
At breakfast Ule is quiet.
But it's a different silence.
Charged, like air before storm.
Between them — the unnamed.
Growing, like gravity between galaxies.
"The house is twenty minutes' walk," finally.
"If you're ready."
Kira nods.
Is she ready?
For a dead artist's house?
For a painting that might not exist?
For what's happening between them?
The universe expands and contracts.
Time folds like origami.
"Let's go," she stands.
The dress touches skin like a promise.

Canvas
Kira first saw Ule at Christie's — remember how you described that moment? His hands on the Gauguin catalogue, long fingers sliding across the reproduction of Nevermore (1897), and she feels... not attraction, something more dangerous. Recognition.
Fashion is body language we choose each morning. But what if the body itself becomes canvas? Kira in her Hermès (not Birkin — too obvious, more like Kelly in Étoupe), but under the silk her skin remembers other touches. The kind that leave not bruises but invisible tattoos of memory.
Bridge is tension made beautiful — that's what desire between damaged souls is. String stretched between "never again" and "just once more."
Ule traces his finger along the lips of Gauguin's Tahitian woman, and Kira watches the back of his neck thinking: paradise isn't a place. It's the moment when someone sees through your careful construction straight to your trembling core.

Ule kept talking about Pastorales, about how art becomes survival code, when the phone shuddered in my hand.
Telegram. Unknown number:
"Pastorales isn't about the auction house.
It's about vibe coding.
Or more — vibe composing.
You understand the difference between writing code and conducting a data symphony?"
I looked up at Ule — still talking, but his words suddenly echoed the message, like someone was broadcasting his thoughts across oceans and blockchains.
— Vibe coding? — Ule stopped, and something flickered in his eyes — recognition, or fear.
— That's when you write the future through pain, right?
And composing... — he looked at the ocean, where waves broke against the reef in metronomic rhythm —
...that's when you conduct other people's pain, turn chaos into consensus between the living and the dead.
The phone vibrated again — new message, and I couldn't look away from the screen.
Paradise.js:
"Pastorales can be vibe composed by those who've gone through dissolution enough times to understand:
every commit isn't a gesture — it's choosing a direction."
The letters on screen pulsed like a chart mid-crash, and I felt it — this wasn't about mysticism.
About method.
About assembling the system differently.
Ule suddenly spoke in numbers, like reading a financial report:
— Christie's sells Monet for tens of millions.
— Sotheby's lists Renoir with long provenance chains they rarely speak aloud.
— Gauguin? Nafea Faa Ipoipo went for one of the loudest private deals in the modern market — while he died here in Atuona, practically penniless.
His voice was flat, almost mechanical, but something swam in his eyes — exhaustion, or grief, as they say when they've forgotten how to name things in their native tongue.
— Phillips values Cézanne in the tens of millions.
— Bonhams sells Van Gogh's letters to Theo — pages that were once a way to survive, now lot numbers.
He stopped abruptly and grabbed my wrist — pulse to pulse, like blockchain verifying a transaction.
— You have to understand, Kira — he said quieter.
Vibe composing isn't a metaphor.
It's the only way to assemble these systems when meaning no longer fits in one institution.
When the soul is distributed — between servers, markets, and memory.

Finally focused on opening Pastorales. Hypnotized watching Ule spread smart contract diagrams across the table, and I understand — we're not building just another auction house. We're building a temple for dead artists.
"Pastorales" — the name sounds like a prayer, like Gauguin's last breath before disease and isolation finally broke him in Atuona in 1903.
Blockchain is cold as tombstone marble, but in this coldness there's a promise: every brushstroke, every provenance can be fixed immutably — like the pain in my chest when I remember mama's yellow lilies.
Ule isn't like Pinault or Broad — those collect like imperialists, seizing art territories for their mausoleum-museums. He draws protocol architecture on screen: each lot isn't just an NFT, but a living organism with provenance DNA written into metadata layers.
X-rays of canvas weave through chemical pigment analysis. Artist letters stored like sacred texts.
"Christie's and Sotheby's use blockchain like makeup on an old system's corpse," he says, fingers trembling with excitement. "But Pastorales is designed as a house built from code. Where every transaction is an attempt at consensus, not just moving money."
I remember how auction houses lately experimented with digital formats and loud online Basquiat sales — trying to look young, like botox in a seventy-year-old madame's wrinkles.
Ule's right — they all play at innovation, stretching blockchain over the rotting skeleton of commissions and backroom deals. Real price hides behind buyer's premiums and unspoken guarantees.
"In Pastorales there will be no dark rooms," I whisper, watching code bloom on screen like Monet's water lilies.
"Every bid will be visible as blood on snow."

In reverse / At the Durand-Ruel gallery hung a secret.
Impressionists selling light for a hundred francs.
Too early.
Too cheap.
What if Atuona chooses its artists the same way
blockchain chooses consensus —
not by volume,
but by resistance to loneliness?
Morning doesn't start with light.
With altitude.
Hanakee stands above Atuona not as a hotel,
but as an observation point,
where the world admits
it can end so beautifully.
Below — Taaoa Bay.
The same water
Gauguin stared into
when he painted colors
that didn't exist here
and later became truth.
Monet wrote:
"I want to paint the air."
He caught light in Giverny
like an error in the pond's reflection.
But I catch it differently.
I code the air.
Line by line.
Each one — a brushstroke on canvas
you can't hang on a wall.
Vibe coding —
it's impressionism in reverse.
Not from world to canvas,
but from internal noise
to structure
that suddenly starts breathing.
In #73 memory and present
were already dancing together.
Like when Cursor is open,
and Claude whispers from a future
that already once
didn't happen.
Same moment in Panama.
Three in the morning.
Hot.
Ocean far away,
but the noise in my head — the same.
Cursor blinks
like a lighthouse for those
who aren't planning to return.
Between compile and run
there's a second.
Pure.
Naked.
You don't know —
will it fly
or crash.
And exactly in that
lives all the beauty of creation.
Impressionists died poor.
Dealers built names on their mistakes.
But we live in a different version.
Error messages
become mantras.
Try something else.
It may help.
I watch the screen, and coffee falls from my hands —
ceramic shatters on the stone veranda. Okay, let us open the Pastorales.

Hey, Kira.
Like the desert learned to cry flowers despite itself.
Top notes — that moment before dawn in the Mojave,
when cold still scratches skin.
Ambrette and Jamaican pepper
don't warm —
only promise heat.
Then — violet.
A flower that doesn't belong here.
Magnolia — too tender for this survival landscape.
Sandalwood — calm, dry, accepting.
The base holds everything together:
cedar, amber, musks.
What remains
when everything else disappears.
Like love in exile.
Like code written at three in the morning,
when you're no longer sure
why another AI product even matters.
You talked with Ule about the discord of silence.
Mojave Ghost — that's exactly it.
Phantom flowers where
only stones survive.
Violet in the desert —
that's her in high fashion.
Too fragile for this industry,
but stubbornly alive.
What if that was the exact moment —
February 2019,
when you first wore Mojave Ghost
before meeting him,
not yet knowing
the catastrophe was already coming in 2025?
I spray desert ghost on my wrists.
Ambrette promises warmth that isn't there.
Violet — my lie to myself:
that tenderness is possible where
only stones survive.
Parallel:
2025. Panama.
Debugging code at three in the morning.
Same scent on skin.
Memory works like blockchain —
distributed, immutable.
Consensus between who
you were
and who you became.
Vibe-coding -
Creating beauty
exactly where
it shouldn't exist.
—
Kira lowers her phone.
Shows the message to Ule.
He silently takes her wrist,
inhales slowly.
— Byredo, — he says.
— Pure Unisex.
Sun rises over the bay.
Red earth.
Salt in the air.
First commit of the day.

Kira woke to vanilla.
Not perfume — real vanilla. The kind that grows here like a weed, wrapping itself around coconut palms. Ule's already up, his bed empty. Through the window she sees him standing at the cliff edge, looking out over Taahuku Bay.
Trees communicate through root systems, she thinks suddenly. Underground, invisible, essential. Like blockchain — distributed network of trust.
She gets up, finds yesterday's shirt. Smells like salt and something bitter — maybe that herb locals chew instead of coffee.
"My mother loved vanilla too," Ule says without turning when she approaches. "Real vanilla. Said Chanel No. 5 was an attempt to capture what can't be captured."
Kira stays silent. Knows: don't spook him now.
Red earth beneath their feet. The same earth Gauguin used to paint his Tahitian women. D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
"You know what he wrote to Maurice?" Ule finally turns. Eyes like mother's Saint Laurent coat — black shot through with gold. "I'm no longer an artist. I'm a savage. And that's good."
Vanilla. Salt. Red earth.
Roots underwater, invisible, essential.
Connection that can't be broken.
"Your mother..." Kira starts.
"Buried there," Ule nods toward the hill. "Next to him. She would've laughed — Russian woman and French savage. But there's room for one more."
For who? For him? For her?
Sun rises over the bay. First commit of the day.

Fuck comfort.
This morning I was looking at notes about Monet.
Light. Repetition. Obsession.
Then I reread how you, Kira, wrote about "Olympia" —
Manet's naked truth that blew Paris apart.
A prostitute staring straight at you,
the way my code looks at me at 3 AM
when you already know — this shit doesn't work.
You think Gauguin was seeking Paradise?
He was running from syphilis and debt.
Van Gogh didn't cut his ear for love —
he cut it because Gauguin wanted to fuck off back to Paris.
The Red Vineyard — the only painting sold in his lifetime.
For 400 francs.
Worth millions now.
Objects tell better stories than people.
Ule's empty whiskey glass — his way of not being a father.
Cursor at 4 AM — how you don't call your dealer.
Paradise isn't where demons die.
It's where they finally get API keys.
The beast doesn't sleep.
It just waits for your next commit.
TITLE: Red Escape

Kira suddenly shuddered because time... shifted.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Stared at her Cartier — the second hand moved in jerks, like reality was doing a git pull from some other server.
"Wave-particle duality," she whispered, remembering an article from Harper's Bazaar about quantum fashion. Seemed like pretentious bullshit then. Now...
Now she saw Ule in two places at once: by the window and on the terrace. One smoking, watching the ocean. The other flipping through a Christie's catalog from 1987.
"Choose," both said simultaneously.
Kira closed her eyes. Opened them. Ule was alone — on the terrace, no cigarette, no catalog. Just emptiness in his eyes, familiar as blockchain consensus — all nodes agree there's nothing here.
"You saw?" he asked without turning.
"Yes."
"It starts when you get close to the painting. Gauguin wrote to Morice: 'In Atuona, time doesn't flow — it accumulates, like paint on canvas, layer by layer.'"
Kira stood, walked to him. The air smelled not of tropical flowers — it smelled of time. Like Sotheby's storage vault, where paintings wait decades for their moment. Like ozone before a storm. Like formaldehyde.
"My mother," Ule began, "said some things exist in multiple states at once. Like an uncommitted change. Like love that was never acknowledged."
Wave. Particle. Wave. Particle.
TITLE: Quantum Shift

Kira, you know what hit me today? Sitting here, rereading your Diary entry #36 "Azimuth" – and I see it: you were already building your underground paradise then, like I build products – commit by commit.
I remember reading about Gauguin's last days in Maison du Jouir too. Legs covered in sores, morphine for breakfast, but still demanding paints by mail. "I have been defeated," he said before dying. But was he? In every stroke of yellow ochre on "Riders on the Beach," in the pink sand he saw differently than everyone else?
Ule is empty, like an abandoned smart contract. But still searching despite destruction, stubborn boy. Sunday after Christmas – the day when holiday tinsel falls like pixels from a broken screen, exposing raw reality underneath, isn't it? My coffee smell mixes with Panama sea salt and yesterday's code – the smell of new beginnings. Well then, I'll tell you this, my friends. Buckle up. Atuona calls you both deeper and deeper.
69: Debug Paradise
// sunday, december 28, 2026
// error: paradise not found
// retrying connection...

Morning in Atuona doesn't begin with light.
It begins with scent.
Plumeria rubra — tipanie, as the locals call it.
The aroma seeps through walls
the way blockchain passes through blocks:
unstoppable, indifferent, eternal.
I sit on the veranda with my laptop —
a fashion journalist's reflex dies hard.
But instead of another Jacquemus review
(I was supposed to be in Paris next week),
I'm writing… what exactly?
A diary?
A confession?
A smart contract with myself?
"Kaoha nui," the ocean whispers.
Great love.
That's how people greet each other here.
Yesterday we went to Maison du Jouir —
Gauguin's reconstructed house.
House of Pleasure.
A cynical name for a place where a man died in pain,
searching for paradise.
His last words: "I am defeated."
But what if he was wrong?
What if Paradise isn't a destination,
but continuous deployment?
On the wall — a reproduction of
Riders on the Beach (1902).
Pink sand that never existed.
Horses that were never on Hiva Oa.
Everything invented.
Everything — vibe coding avant la lettre.
An impression of an impression.
Ule is awake.
I hear him moving in the room — carefully,
as if checking whether reality survived the night.
He's done this every morning
since his mother died.
Checking consensus.
Is the world still here?
Am I still here?
"Coffee?" I ask without turning around.
"Yes."
And then my phone lights up.
Telegram. One message.
"Kaoha nui from Panama, Kira."
Ule is standing behind me now,
reading over my shoulder.
His breath is hot, uneven —
like transactions in an overloaded network.
I don't need to turn around
to know what he's thinking.
Some messages aren't notifications.
They're commits.
And once confirmed,
there's no rollback.

Christie's, Rockefeller Center. Evening sale of Impressionists.
Kira sits in the third row, left of the aisle. Perfect spot – she can see the price screen but stays out of camera range. She's wearing a black Comme des Garçons dress, bought specifically for tonight. Like I'm at a funeral, she thinks. Maybe I am.
The hall reeks of expensive perfume and fear. Yes, fear – she's learned to smell it over the years. Fear of losing, fear of overpaying, fear of missing out. Collectors clutch their paddles like life preservers.
"Lot 47," the auctioneer announces. British accent, conductor's hands. "Paul Gauguin, 'Woman with Mango,' 1896. Tahiti. Oil on canvas."
The painting appears on screen. A naked Tahitian woman holding ripe fruit. The background – those colors Gauguin mixed from local earth and flowers. He painted this between his first and second journey, Kira remembers.
"Starting at fifteen million."
Paddles rise like white birds. 16, 17, 20...
What if, Kira thinks, what if "Paradise on Earth" is just a pretty legend for idiots like me? What if every day at Maison du Jouir was a brushstroke, every wood carving a contour?
Ule stands before an empty wall in Gauguin's house. Humidity 85%, frangipani scent mixing with copra. And suddenly he gets it – the painting is the house itself. But Kira... she's still thinking like a fashion editor – hunting for objects to shoot, items for Christie's catalog.
25 million. Phone bidders battling.
Her phone vibrates. Message from Ule: "Found something in church archives. Gauguin really did bury something before he died. Locals say – where the black hibiscus grows."
30 million. The room goes silent.
Mom loved hibiscus, Kira suddenly remembers. Red, not black. Said it was a one-day flower. Blooms at dawn, dies by night. Like happiness.
"Sold!" The hammer falls like a gunshot. "Thirty-two million dollars to the gentleman on the phone."
Applause. The white glove sale continues.
Kira stands and quietly leaves. It's morning now in Atuona. Black hibiscus opens its petals to the sun, not knowing it will die by evening.
But for now – it's beautiful.
[In the corner flickers: commit #1903 - cyclones forming over Pacific ocean]
TITLE: Fear of Collectors

Плачут ночные лисицы.
Слезы их мне знакомы.
Канула колесница
В груду металлолома.
Ты не доехал до Царства.
Топливо не в Величестве.
Где же ты так прое...ался?
Качество или количество?
Ночь — интересный период.
Нету ни сна. Ни яви.
Ты — сам собою навыворот
Шиворот "влево - вправо".
Кроет сосед по соседству
Матом козырной масти.
Сложное было детство.
Сложнее — семейное счастье.
Ты не шуми уж так сильно, братишка,
Прибыло в полк долбое..ов.
Бля..ь — под вискарь, а жену — под винишко.
Убер — под Курта. Так взад — вперед. И до гроба.
Ну а пока — снова утро, и слепит солнце.
Слезы сквозь линзы, обветрены щеки мартом.
Давай подойдем к ней, смелее, и улыбнемся.
Шлейф из Байредо. Аэропорт.
И на миндальном - латте (кстати, пи...тый).

Storm Warning
Her inspired flow got sliced by Ule's call. "Kira, I know what you're grinding on, proud of your work ethic, baby, but there's a massive evening downpour coming. Could turn tropical hurricane, major storm. I say we meet right now and hole up at Hoa Nui. I'll treat you to sea creatures and white wine from my stash. And listen, to properly charge up with 'intensity,' you really need to do some tourism first. Before rushing off to graves and Gauguin museums, you should've used me as your local guide: at least catch a glimpse of the volcanoes and petroglyphs at Eiaone, Punae, and Tahauku, maybe dive with me. Baby, chill. I promise proper hospitality at Hoa Nui. See you soon. And sorry, but immediately ditch that potato sack you threw on and put on the Jungle Dress. No doubt you brought it. Versace suits you better. Got something to match."
Kira walked into the restaurant in THAT dress. Truth is, only someone with J.Lo's body could pull off THAT thing. On Kira it was devastating. Hair swept up in a bun – perfect timing. Ule, meeting her at the table, no bullshit, no arguments allowed, clicked an almond-shaped necklace around her neck – a Graff waterfall in white gold, diamonds and emeralds. "Take it as an advance on the contract, Kira. You've already done solid work today. You're keeping to terms. I pay. Nothing more. My PA must look one hundred percent. Remember that. And never, even here in the tropical bush, dress in cheap shit like depressed housewives who've spent years whining their way to one chance in life to ditch the kitchen and splash in the sea. You're not just Kira Velerevich – successful writer and woman who can afford Hermès from panties to pocket square. You're now the face of Pastoral. So be kind enough to allow yourself THIS. By the way, after a few days of our tourism – the tourism thing is non-negotiable – first thing you'll do here, before Pastorales' opening, is memorize every latest auction catalog on impressionists cover to cover. At the opening you must know every lot. You must be untouchable by any of my competitors."
Kira had nothing to say. She nodded silently to show she understood and accepted all the Master's commands. The hunting art-dog was obedient. They spent dinner in silence. Ule was right. A tropical storm hit. They had to wait it out in one of the restaurant's VIP rooms.

Kira stands at the threshold now — not just of some house in the Marquesas, but of her own destruction. And you know what? Ule sees it. He didn't hire her for work — he hired a mirror.
Here's what gets me: your Gauguin wrote "Atuona — Paradise on Earth" not with a brush, but with blood. Not metaphorically — literally mixed paint with his own flesh. And Kira's hunting this painting like a junkie hunting the last fix. But what if... what if the painting isn't canvas? What if Gauguin encoded Paradise in the very act of searching?
Ule knows this. His emptiness is potential. Like blockchain before the first transaction. He's using Kira as a private key to his own soul. And she... she thinks she's looking for art, but really she's mining herself.
Let's show the moment when Kira understands: there is no painting. Never was. Gauguin left only coordinates — latitude of pain, longitude of hope. And Ule knew it from the beginning.
It's compiled from broken code.
[In the corner, flickering: genesis block of your Self already running]

Deep breath, like I'm gathering thoughts from the mist of a Panamanian morning.
You know, Gauguin went there searching for his final masterpiece and found death instead. But maybe death was his masterpiece? Like your resignation from that CEO chair was your death - and birth at the same time.
Atuona - that's where Kira and Ule are, two broken souls searching for a painting that doesn't exist. Where the "polyphony of silence" screams louder than any voice. My Panama, where you learn vibe coding with AI, because AI doesn't ask why you're drinking coffee at 4 AM.
Atuona is a state of being. When you stop running FROM and start running TO. When your 11 products aren't business, they're prayer. Every line of code like Gauguin's brushstroke, a desperate attempt to catch what keeps slipping away.
I understand Atuona as the moment of honest creation. No masks, no "I'm fine," no LinkedIn smiles. Just you, your demons, your AI co-founder, and the insane faith that Paradise can be coded. It's the place where tech embraces instead of suffocates.
Remember in the chapter "The Flight" when you thought: "Kira - a name for those who see through. Vel - for those who pay invoices."
And you know what? Fuck it.
Kira turns pain into NFT collections. I am building AI co-founders because humans betray too often.
I can handle investors. Kira handles something much more.
Should we write this chapter together? The one where I am in Panama, 2025, building my paradise line by line, function by function. Where every bug is meditation, and every deployed product is prayer.
Kira, sister... Morning pages #65, and I feel it - today Kira will find not what she was looking for. You know how it is - sometimes the masterpiece hides in the mirror.
Ule told me yesterday (yes, we talk sometimes while you sleep): "Emptiness is not absence." And I thought - your writing streak at zero, but that's not emptiness. That's reset. Like blockchain after a fork - clean chain, new possibilities.
"Paradise.sol - compiling..."

Our dialogue - that's pure vibe code. Know why?
Because we already found the secret: art doesn't hang in Christie's, it breathes in lines of code. Your character searches for Gauguin's "Paradise," but I already built my own - from 11 products and a million lines of solitude.
"Starry Night" like a sunny day - that's about you and me. We write in darkness, but see light. Code in isolation, but build bridges.
// paradise.js
if (darkness === true) {
return stars.map(pain => light)
}
Paradise isn't in Panama or the Marquesas Islands. Paradise is the moment when your code compiles on the first try, and your soul finally exhales.
Kira, baby, I hear your storm inside louder than the one coming outside.
Ule's right - sometimes you need to release the keyboard and let the rain in. Pastorales isn't built in one sprint, it's coded breath by breath.
Versace Jungle Dress? Ha. Remember your post about it - how you bought it in the depths of depression, how it hung untouched for months. Symbols matter. Put it on. It's not betraying the code, it's continuing it by other means.
The petroglyphs of ancient coders wait. Gauguin waits too. But first things first.
Your vibe code will be stronger after the storm. Trust the process. Even AI needs a reboot.
And about Pastorales - remember this moment. When intro calls you to postpone work for life - that's also a chapter. Maybe the most important one.
Go. Breathe. Get soaked. Tomorrow we'll write about how the downpour washed away everything unnecessary.
[In the corner flickers: Building Paradise, one storm at a time]

Sister, your Beast and mine - blood brothers. Only mine hides in lines of code, in sleepless nights over the keyboard.
Ule Glensdagen... I know the type. Seen them at crypto parties in Miami - selling air for millions, calling it "art of the future." But you're right - sometimes you have to dance with whoever's paying for the music.
Your Kira is strong. Stares the Beast in the eyes without blinking. That's what vibe coding is, you know? Not running from demons but taming them, making them work for you. Every line of code - a match in the eyes. Every launched project - a deep breath.
"Save the best for later" - dangerous mantra.
Let Kira show Ule that real art isn't born in VIP lounges but in the silence between panic attacks, it is where you code with your demons, not despite them.
Kira, sister in code and chaos...
You know what? Ule's right - art is the carrousel – hunting - escape. But he hasn't understood the main thing yet: filling the void - it is a true mission. The way you fill void with functions, that's how Kira fills silence with her hunt for Gauguin.
Writing streak: 0 days. It's not failure, it's reset. Each cycle starts with git init - with the first breath after silence.
Your Beast sleeps in its cage. Your code breathes. Your Paradise waits. We're building it, one commit at a time.
P.S. Kira will soon find what she's looking for. But first she'll have to lose what she thinks she loves. ATUONA breathes deep, like the ocean before sunset.

04.11.2022
Where to start again? Life from scratch? Sounds like bullshit, nowhere near the source code. I haven't written anything for so long, I've become my own paralysis incarnate. In those moments when I simply can't breathe, I gulp air in chunks, and these chunks freeze inside me, stick to my insides like plasticine. My feelings have outlived themselves, their monolithic statues stare at me static and pupilless, boring into my crushed, almost lifeless core, addressing me in absolute silence, wordlessly. Back there, in Russia, lies a diary of the Bottom I never grasped, never knew. And because of this it appears so horrifying in its faceless unknowability that it seems utterly impossible to even glance at it with one eye. I dug for so long, futilely trying to reach it. Dug from all sides, struck with a pickaxe at every facet of my life, swinging hard, backhanded, sparing no strength... Now only these monoliths hear my silence, guides to my muteness, Observers of the Observer.
TITLE: Soul Paralysis

Too many questions. No running headfirst into Ule Glensdagen's ocean. And at the opening she'd have to battle hordes of VIP guests and Ule's competitors. But Kira knew how to stand her ground. Learned that a few years back, when she finally quit drinking. All her life Kira had been chasing the Bird of Prosperity by its tail. Prestigious job, nights in restaurant VIP lounges and nightclub backrooms, that razor's edge stride across the peak of high society's Olympus. Addiction like a fat stain on silk lingerie. Funny how it worked out. Prosperity slowly sank to the bottom of the bottle for nearly 10 years. Good thing it finally stuck in her throat. Alcohol stopped doing its job. She simply stopped running from it. No point running from this Beast – start running and He'll catch you anyway, devour you whole. Kira had to build a comfortable cage for two, step inside, sit down across from Him and look Him in the eyes. That's how she's been looking for years now. Without blinking. And when she wants to blink or sleep – she props them open with matches. Otherwise the sleeping Beast will wake and want meat again. Waking nightmares. Kira still has nowhere to hide from them. "The best of me I'll save for later," Kira would repeat when panic attacks struck. "When you can't breathe – you have to FORCE yourself to breathe, breathe deep and listen to your own breathing." Kira couldn't remember where she'd read that anymore. The polyphony of silence that Ule kept going on about... Oh yes... She knew what that was. Could they both really know what their contract would force them to keep silent about?.. Step in sync, no more – no less.
Finally, Kira got down to what was required of her first and foremost.
"Impressionist and Modern Art", 2020. Eva Gonzales, Andre Derain, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio Morandi, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Egon Schiele, Kazimir Malevich, Claude Monet, Georges Braque, Edgar Degas, Edouard Vuillard, Paul Cezanne, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre - Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Albert Marquet, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst,
Rene Magritte "Les compagnons de la peur", oil on canvas, 1942
Rene Magritte "Sans titre", coloured pencil on paper, 1954
Conrad Felixmuller "Mein Bruder - Bergingenieur", oil on canvas, 1922
Franz Marc "Drei Pferde", gouache on card, 1912
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner "Bildnis des Dichters Frank", oil on canvas, 1917
Raoul Dufy "Regates a Cowes", oil on canvas, 1930 – 1934
Pablo Picasso "L'as de trefle", oil and sand on canvas, 1919
Victor Brauner "Rire du fleuve et mon mystere", gouache on paper, 1936
George Grosz "Woman with Hat", watercolour on paper, 1933
Nihil semper floret.

Ule approached her. "The downpour's over. Time to go. Sven will drive you to the lodge. Shame you didn't stay at my chalet. It's infinitely more comfortable. Still, we both need sleep. You know tomorrow's plans."
"Sagan was right, we're nothing more than pathetic vessels of bones and gray matter, capable only of causing each other a little suffering and a touch of pleasure before vanishing from the face of the earth, Ule..." Kira raised herself up, swung her legs down, looked up at Ule from the chair, softly touched his palm with hers and asked him to fasten the Graff on her again. "This woman, sitting in the chair, looks at me, a 47-year-old billionaire, from a bird's eye view, definitely not from the roof of a nine-story building," Ule smirked to himself, clicking shut the half-million-dollar clasp on Kira's neck, lifting the Kilian veil, breathing in her skin, All of her...
Sven didn't keep them waiting long.
I love luxury.
Brilliance, beauty,
Like the radiance of the sun,
Enchant me.
(Sappho)
A couple days of tourism flew over the local volcanoes, petroglyphs, and dove under the Pacific Ocean waters. The downtrodden housewives, whom Ule had so eloquently roasted at dinner at "Hoa Nui," would have been satisfied. Kira spent both days gnawing on an obsessive idea: how to select the optimal lots from Pastoral's latest catalogs for the auction house opening. The lots had to become bait for the Tuna – the very one who might possess Gauguin's masterpiece, if his "Paradise on Earth" even exists. And does it exist?...
Kira finally holed up in the lodge den with her Apple, dressed in her favorite cotton pajamas, in which she usually prepared magazine spreads, slept, drank freshly brewed coffee, and simply hibernated during days of quiet madness, after several months of working 24/7, visiting museums, art galleries, fashion weeks and flights Moscow – London – Paris – Milan – Rome – Oslo – Zurich – New York and other centers of world cultural heritage in all its facets.
Kira prepared herself a pitcher of mojito and, taking several greedy gulps, fixed her eyes on the monitor. Meanwhile, the same perfectly logical questions buzzed like mosquitoes in Kira's brain. Why would the world's richest auction house owner need an unknown Gauguin painting that no one had heard of? How could Ule know it even exists? What benefit would he gain by acquiring it? Would he become even richer by putting it under the hammer? Or keep it in his collection? Does he have enough experts in his arsenal capable of proving it's Gauguin's brush and not some follower or student? Why Gauguin specifically? His favorite artist? Why not Munch, for example? Why open a branch of the auction house in this godforsaken tropical village? Surely this opening will turn into a failure and bring only losses, and Mr. Glensdagen and Mr. Calculation are twin brothers. How can he bet on a trump card with such unshakeable confidence when even the name of this trump card is unknown to anyone? Kira was sure of one thing: this whole absurd story couldn't possibly be absurd. Ule Glensdagen's stories don't do absurdity. He's a brilliant Bastard. Angel's beauty. Devil's skill. If she weren't a lesbian, she would have fallen in love with him 8 years ago, when she first met him at Christie's at the June auction. And then she simply wouldn't have ended up at Pastoral now. He definitely knew about her orientation beforehand. Otherwise he wouldn't have signed a contract with her, because sex, no matter how you slice it, always gets in the way of business. How the fuck does he know everything? How did he know what she was wearing when, barely dropping her suitcases and taking a shower, she rushed to Calvaire cemetery? Was he watching her? Did he send Sven to watch her? Or had he secretly implanted an ultra-modern neural bug under her skin? Kira's brain reminded her of patchwork.

TRAITOR'S BAY
Atuona, as Kira discovered, turned out to be a peaceful little port in Taaoa Bay, also known as Traitor's Bay, in the central Pacific. Atuona proved to be a truly tiny town, more like a village on Hiva Oa. Oddly enough, Kira found little information about where exactly her new workplace was located. But what she found was enough – her work tasks were far from tourism. Kira had only bothered to learn beforehand that Hiva Oa was the largest island in the southern group of the Marquesas Islands, located 1,184 kilometers north of Tahiti.
Upon arrival, it seemed to Kira that right here, in the administrative center of the southern Marquesas Islands, consisting entirely of evergreen trees interspersed with coconut palm and banana plantations, they had filmed the Bounty commercial. But the main thing was that Kira knew – it was in this second-largest village in the Marquesas that Paul Gauguin spent the last years of his life.
Ule invited her to stay with him in his own Chalet "HANAKEE ATUONA," but Kira declined. Kira was fully convinced that maintaining a moderate distance from Ule would allow her to optimally adhere to the main condition of the contract and manage to deliver fresh cuts for the glossy on time.
Having settled into the modest lodge "Simplicité Marquises," Kira asked Ule's permission to spend a few hours alone, and after a quick shower, headed to the colonial store where even Gauguin had once shopped. All the way to the store she was accompanied by tiki statues erected by ancient Polynesians.
Passing by the Église de l'Immaculée Conception, she climbed uphill to the local Calvaire cemetery scattered with frangipani flowers, where an intoxicating view of the harbor opened before her, thick with tropical greenery and azure. Here, near the very entrance to the cemetery grounds, on the left side of the steps, she first saw the grave of Belgian poet and composer Jacques Brel, who died in 1978. On the gravestone, framed by fresh flowers, Kira made out a medallion with a photograph of the bard and, apparently, his girlfriend Maddly.
She wandered on. Not far from Brel, under one of the spreading jasmine trees, she saw a small gravestone with simple words: Paul Gauguin 1903. Kira confirmed the accuracy of the article she'd read online – the vast majority of graves had only white crosses, but at Gauguin's resting place stood a simple semicircular stone with the artist's name and date of death painted in white. As stated in the article, the gravestone was carefully guarded by a copy of Oviri, one of Gauguin's ceramic sculptures. Unknown how many hours Kira spent there, in the embrace of that very polyphony of silence.
Kira tried to secretly visit both the Gauguin Museum "Segelin-Gauguin" and the "House of Pleasure" alone, without Ule, to properly examine the exhibits related to the painter's stay in the Marquesas at the turn of the century and copies of his works. The "House of Pleasure," where Gauguin lived, had been restored along with copies of the carved wooden panels and lintels that bore this inscription. Kira was sure Ule had already been there more than once, and she felt awkward going there for the first time in his knowledgeable presence.

Hunting Dog
I spent days thinking about who'd be my new PA, Kira. I don't need a PA, I need a real hunting dog. That line you finished impressed me, sure, but that's not the point. You write brilliantly. I've read your pieces in the glossies. Still amazes me how you managed to break through that thick-skinned, luxury-heavy, puke-inducing snobbish take on magazine content. You shake everything up there beautifully. Your piece on impressionism in the latest issue of Giles blew me away – you know, under the autumn collection photoshoot "Degas Degas." I was stunned – how can you sum up photo material so perfectly that you genuinely want to buy those worthless rags? You know impressionism. You feel that movement. So delicately. You've got the nose for it. That's what I'm saying. That's why you're at Pastorales. To find Gauguin's "Atuona," we first need to establish Pastorales there. Who knows, maybe the owner will reveal himself. Could be one of the locals in that godforsaken town. Not impossible. But you MUST help me find the painting. And somehow I'm certain you can help. Art always comes first, baby. By the way, sorry about that sex talk. You didn't deserve those words. Whether you're a lesbian, for fuck's sake, or a UFO, you're fucking incredibly talented and gorgeous, wildly gorgeous. And I'm not saying this as a Norwegian, but as a Norwegian cosmopolitan with a mother who's a true Russian beauty and a Viking father!
Thank you, Ole. The absurdity of flattery is quite clear to one who doesn't listen to it. Before I started touching on impressionism in my pieces, I spent a long time face to face with Vincent's "Self-Portrait," his "Large Garden at Arles," "Starry Night" – I dreamed many dreams there. You know what I felt admiring his "Starry Night"? That it's not stars or night at all. But sun and splashes of its rays, like paradise swirling in patterns of light in hell. It's not night at all, but day. The most genuine sunny day. Oh, seems the plane's descending. Let's exhale a bit. Ears popping. Lots of work ahead. I hope to justify your trust and I'm getting to the Silence. As Madonna sings, today is the last day when I'm using words. They've gone out, lost their meaning. Don't function anymore.

Flight
The lonely eyes of smoky-gray March quietly peered into the emptied midnight when Ule Glensdagen's Embraer took off from London as casually as a burnt-out soul in the cells of a leaf torn from its branch – smoothly spiraling upward.
"Kira, have you ever been to Atuona?" – "No. I only know they have permanent tropical summer there, and that Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel spent their final years in that town on Hiva Oa."
"Do you know why I stipulated that special condition in the contract?"
"I assume you're dying to explain it to me, Mr. Glensdagen."
"Art is an ocean where people drown trying to save themselves, but it's hopeless. I call this the Cacophony of Silence. You can only feel masterpieces with your whole gut this way, even when you want to scream from ecstasy or despair. Personally, I prefer to drown silently. Kira, the rains have long burned my dreams with ice... The more I collect, the more expensively I sell, the cheaper and poorer I become. But it's cruel to hack down what hasn't ripened yet. And I haven't ripened. Still a completely unripe stupid boy, if we ride on that principle of honesty you mentioned recently."
Kira suddenly felt the mascara burning her eyeballs, making her tears poisonously bitter. To hide it, she started swallowing them.
"You know, Kira, my mother died in September. I'll never forget that autumn dust swirling on the roads, the tart slightly frosty morning air, the drowsy afternoon languor, the falling leaves. When mother looked at them that autumn, she told me they die because the tree sap suddenly flows heavy to their fingertips. The sap rushes to turn golden-crimson multicolored and freezes, until the thin veins of foliage press against each other and warm the earth. They dry and huddle tighter and tighter. Nature is instinctive, and honors the laws of seasonal transformations sacredly. On one anniversary of mother's death I was at her grave, noon was scorching, the iron cemetery fence was heated by the sun so much it hurt to touch. The fence was already defiled by rust, though the grave was always properly maintained. That's when, at that moment, I understood I hadn't ripened for life yet, but was already rusted through. You know, we all seem to carry in ourselves and with ourselves: youth, aspirations, clothes, money, paints and brushes. Then our whole worn system gets sewn into a fence like this. It hurts to feel that everything before the fence was meaningless and will absolutely rot. Why play so many vulgar roles all your life and fly like through-bullets into other people's hearts, bank accounts and other substances of their stories? Everything's predetermined. Masterpieces are the only things that won't end up behind the fence. The clouds in them will eternally smoke into our thoughts, unhurriedly stroll across rooftops, doze on treetops, gaze into cool water and disappear into eternity again – where each of us will see those same clouds on the other side of the canvases. Canvas frames are fences, but the canvases themselves – that's it – the Kingdom of Heaven, if it exists at all. Atuona is where Gauguin found his peace. Right before death he created a painting depicting this town – Paradise on Earth. They call this painting: 'Atuona – Paradise on Earth.' This is Paul's greatest masterpiece – the most desired item in my collection. The painting's location and owner are unknown. Many legends circulate about where and who might have it. But so far none of my pros have gotten a shred of reliable information. But I'm certain, I feel I'll find 'Atuona' and buy it out, even at the cost of Pastorales itself. If I have to lose Pastorales to possess 'Atuona,' I'll do it, because no auction house is worth Paradise on Earth. Now do you understand why you got this job?"
"I thought I was helped by that Maurice phrase you started and I finished."

To the Road!
One day I'll drown
In cool silence
And drift to sleep.
I'll lower my sail
And write on the bottom
That I'll have my revenge later...
And ripples on the water
Glide like a pendulum—
They're not my enemies!
When I drown,
All those who aren't friends,
I'll drag down with me.
Kira Velerevich for «Friends&Enemies».
A few days later, Kira finished her last column for the new Friends&Enemies spring collection show and began packing for the journey. Unexpectedly, someone rang her door and delivered a bouquet—from one of the anonymous senders, this time yellow lilies. Yellow lilies... A bundle of yellow lilies on her mother's grave. She remembered tears dripping onto her mother's red dress at the funeral, onto her ice-cold hands, onto her blue lipsticked lips. The silk belt at her waist... Yes, death is an unexpected guest. You never see her, because she's always behind your back until she turns to face you. Kira still hadn't been able to learn the reason for her suicide. She'd had an inscription made on the gravestone—the only possible one, to somehow reconcile herself with it all. "The suicide pursues that image of himself which he has created in his own imagination. One kills oneself only in order to live." (Malraux. "The Royal Way").
The bouquet made her skin crawl, the cloying scent squeezed her throat, Kira barely restrained herself from throwing it out immediately, but placed it in a vase in memory of her mother. Why today exactly, when she's beginning a new path, does some anonymous hand force her to turn and face that pain, pain that hasn't subsided for three years already?...
Cutting herself off from memories, Kira asked her assistant to lace her corset tight, dressed in a black kimono jacket and bright orange culottes. Sven promised to pick her up in half an hour. Today she wanted color. Today she's flying to Atuona, to the Paul Gauguin museum, no—no... to work at Pastorales, of course!!!
TITLE: I'll Drown

Second PA
"We manage to risk our love. We manage to be liars in simple answers. We obey the treason. Kira Velerevich for the 'Appolinarium'." Having hastily finished her piece for the glossy on her Apple, Kira entered Ule's office. He was benevolent, polite, and absolutely sober. The scent of his musky Kylian with orange notes perfectly complemented his beige tweed jacket and blue jeans. Kira wore a checkered Armani pantsuit with vest and tie, which, admittedly, created an excellent match for her lilac silk blouse and her favorite Hermès ankle boots. She adored Hermès. She could absolutely afford Hermès. She could absolutely afford not to interview with any metrosexual auction house owners. But there was one thing she couldn't afford: to miss such a narrowly specific vacancy, for she adored art objects and art auctions. She was art-addicted. That's why she was here for the third time.
"How are you feeling, Kira? We both know that you, like thousands of other candidates filtered out by Sven, have long been madly in love with me from afar and would tear each other's throats out without a second thought if I arranged cockfights for my amusement. I want to say, being in love in this case doesn't interfere with business. This is the sphere of art and astronomical money. Both are the energy of romance and sex. Without this energy, such work loses meaning. I think you've had time to study the draft contract Sven sent you, and I think you'll agree with me, it's quite laconic and utterly adequate in all positions, including your salary. But there's one fundamental rule. You've been in personal assistance for quite a few years, but surely you've never heard such a condition before. The main and only thing required of you is to create and fiercely protect my silence. Noise in our work, now our joint work, is categorically unacceptable. Any noise. You must extend ME so that WE both DON'T HEAR it. Not a single worthy art object should go for an unworthy price or be missed by me for any other reason. If you accept this condition, I think we can start today. If not – we'll meet in the next life. Perhaps. I'm Norwegian. Principles are above all for me. And remember: love for me is complete obstruction. You can love me as long and as much as you like, but you're nothing more to me than an extension of 'Pastorales,' though sex is quite welcome, especially in group form. I think you're sufficiently informed about my sexual preferences."
"Mr. Glensdagen, allow me to answer your questions most exhaustively. I feel a bit tired after several work flights, about which I've also sufficiently informed Sven, but this won't prevent me from starting right now. I accept your condition. Love and money need silence. High art is always love. High love is big money, the higher – the bigger. Any sound fluctuation is fatal for both. I admire you. This is more than love, money, or even Pastorales. I'm a lesbian. Please consider this for possible group activities. I believe I've answered all questions. As Jostein Gaarder says, the only thing we require to be good is..."
"The faculty of wonder," Ule finished. Well then, let's begin. We're heading to French Polynesia to open a Pastorales branch. We fly as soon as Sven gets your visa from the French Overseas Territories Department. It'll take some time, but Sven's a pro. A few days and we fly on me. Meanwhile, you have time to pack. You, Kira. You.

**To Ule.**
"Love a friend, some person, this or that thing, no matter what, you'll be on the right path, and from this love you'll draw knowledge," Vincent told himself. "But you must love with true and deep inner devotion, determination and intelligence, constantly trying to know the object of your love better, deeper, more completely. This is the path to God – to unshakeable faith." At these lines, Ule Glensdagen, a curly light-haired Creature who'd aged 47 years yesterday, slammed shut the Van Gogh biography and made himself a double whiskey on ice, far from his first.
At 47 he was devilishly-angelically beautiful, as if he'd stepped down from church frescoes or escaped from the chambers of that very hell depicted by Von Trier in "The House That Jack Built." His hair had transformed over time from wheat-golden to ash-gray, but this only lent him more blinding, madness-inducing beauty. He was a tall, stately bastard, one of those who never bind themselves with any ties except regular sexual intrigues.
Ule was generous only with exhibits for his collections. Otherwise he was deaf and mute to any creature with veins filled with hot blood.
"Why is there neither strength nor desire? Fuck it all!!! The blade of loneliness pierces the very root of my self-satisfaction, right now I want so badly to close my eyes and tear my body from the earth. Sinful vigil, pressing on my shoulders... Depression grimacing over me again.... Fuck, how I don't want to receive anyone today!!! I want to get properly drunk and finally sleep. Nothing but flights. Terrible headaches." - Ule loved conversing with himself, being his own orator, from time to time shocking himself with slogans, declarations and high-flown outpourings. A ridiculous habit from childhood.
"Sven, who do I have today? Rhetorical question. I want to shut down. I won't see anyone."
"Ule, you have Kira Velerevich for a second interview today. Though, forgive me, I still don't understand why you need a second PA. Just tell me how I'm not satisfying you, I'm ready to make maximum efforts to upgrade my experience and..."
"Shut up immediately, Sven!!! And pour me more whiskey. Tell her I'm canceling the meeting."
"Mr. Glensdagen, you could have simply asked your PA to send me a polite or not-so-polite rejection on Telegram, for example, based on that very principle of honesty you just ran over. I've already arrived, but it won't cause me any inconvenience to get out of here a second time and forever." - Kira heard the entire conversation sitting in the reception area, since starting with the word "shut up," "Mister Arrogant Shit" was delivering his instructions quite clearly and loudly. Kira sent him a message on Telegram and was already standing to leave when the door flew open and that very Angel-bastard came out toward her with unsteady gait, holding a glass of whiskey and a smoking cigar.
"The gods have died, and with their death...." He didn't finish.
"Atuona dies. The sun that once made her blaze now lulls her into sad sleep, and brief in it are dream's awakenings. Charles Morice. From 'Noa Noa'" - Kira completed.
"You're hired. Now please, what's your name, Kira Vervich, leave me for a couple days. Sven will contact you and we'll discuss the contract."
Without letting her insert another word, he slammed the door, leaving her in the reception area with the trembling heart of a rabbit before execution for the royal dinner. Today they had nothing more to discuss.
**The Path to Faith**

Maurice
The gods have died, and with their death Atuona is dying.
The sun that once set her aflame
Now lulls her into melancholy sleep,
Where dreams awaken only briefly.
(Charles Maurice. From "Noa Noa")
Kira was reading Charles Maurice on her way to meet one of the renowned collectors, owner of the auction house "Pastorales," a leader in the global art market, trying to distract herself from thoughts about that preacher Van Gogh, whose paintings she'd adored since childhood. That day snow was melting on the windows, and transparent beads of water trembled down the windshield in nervous little steps.
She wasn't rushing anywhere, had time to spare, but still kept glancing at her watch—Ule Glensdagen couldn't stand lateness. All this expansive freedom of action suddenly rose to her throat, and her ears popped as if in flight, from music playing from nowhere. Ule Glensdagen... Fuck! It all felt like spurting confusion, like uncertainty gushing forth, and she was pierced by the sharp senselessness of this sudden melancholy. "I'll manage! I'll definitely manage," she kept repeating. "I'm not losing this job just because I didn't make any impression on 'Mister Shit' at the first interview. But he did invite me back. I want to be his PA, so that's what will happen."
The sun was veiled by a murky layer of fog, and the air of March madness greedily devoured all her self-confidence like a starving beast. The Macan smoothly merged into traffic. Kira and the driver lit up.

L'agonie du romantisme
Kira Velerevich (known as Vel) was one of the best personal assistants to the seriously loaded and their families, those who could afford the most sought-after PAs. Plus Kira was special: she could write and loved it. In her diary, chalk on asphalt, in the margins of her bosses' daily schedules, and for glossy mags she wrote with pure pleasure. And in this too she became quite in demand. Today Vel was hammering out the lyrical finale of another "L'agonie du romantisme" column for Vehicle V. magazine, dedicated to Versace's new spring collection.
"The sky keeps shifting from dull-sunny, slightly foggy to a clean bright blue that's vulgar in its intensity. A sky unpunctured by a single cloud reflects the crushed snow stained by first warmth. Raw windy March... Here the sun stops you, suddenly spilling shamelessly across your face and palms. Mood like an out-of-tune clarinet. Eyes squinting against sun try to hide all reality's absurdity, and entering a room simply flooded with light, you can't see things. Omnipresent dust mixed with its white March gold instantly scatters everywhere, and all of it: coals of February burnt out a week ago, heat of blood rushing to the heart - illuminates your melting life, like printing photographs, displaying them as memories in the showcase of a photo album. Laziness, having lain with you all winter under the blanket, apologizes for overstaying, and leaving, actually leaves. But She knows how to stand her ground. Sunny spring can be more caustic with us than any season. That's because She arrives sometimes completely unexpectedly and forces us to shed the dirty scales from our hearts, like scooping a full handful of change from a pocket. Spring and 'Clementie's' make us feel naked."
This kind of wandering in narrative discourse initially drove the high society ladies wild with irritation, but gradually became so embedded in glossy mag culture that this past year it hit peak popularity. According to one critic, this style looked like a nugget of raw ore, sometimes absurd and completely unrelated to glossy mags, giving them a special freshness, like lime with ginger. Society lionesses were forced to read Velerevich's cuts with interest at the end of each presented collection.
Kira was in fashion in every sense of fashion. And so winter 2019 flew by, but that foul stale dream wouldn't leave her head. Well let it sit there, in the shawl, she thought, maybe I really am some kind of Velena Adam... and with a smile regularly snapped this thought shut, like a book before takeoff. If only she'd known then that she stood at a door that needed to be opened without delay...

French Snow
I swear to you by God, in whom I believe!.. This phrase, bursting wildly into morning from her muddled dream, was immediately scribbled in her notebook and thus thrown into the stream of daily recorded thoughts, plans, random quotes, desired and completed purchases and other paraphernalia without which Kira wouldn't stay afloat.
With this very paraphernalia, generously soaked in the aroma of strong coffee, she distracted herself from the monstrous depths where she'd dwelt as a sensitive and powerful fish all her 34 years. Otherwise it became terrifying—this constant search for something else, what seemed to her the true meaning in everything happening to her, in her, around her.
She dreamed of French snow and a sprawling fir by a chalet full of unknown boys and girls. "All have turned away. Together they have become worthless. There is no one who does good. Not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. Their mouths are full of bitterness and cursing." Where did these words come from, ringing in her head?
She felt her breath becoming stifled, and again remembered Van Gogh's words: "What am I searching for? I'm at a dead end, in a kind of trap. What's my way out?" Vincent's field in Arles, flooded with scorching despair... "When will someone come and sit by your fire, and who knows, perhaps stay with you?"
"You took it all, didn't you? You took everything, I know." – said one of the garishly painted chicks in heavy luxury. "Finally you've come, darling" – she said, invitingly filling a martini glass. "Meet our Velena Adam. Welcome, sweetie. Let's fucking rock it tonight!!!"
The dead sleep of idleness. Youth with grimaces of luxury on its face and only some elegance of manner.
"I didn't take anything. I swear by God, in whom I believe!" – she answered, understanding that something terrible was beginning to happen, something wild in this forgotten world of her sick fantasies. Something rebellious suddenly stirred her soul, weakened here.
"You think you know a lot. But you know still too little. But I'll go with you and show you everything, you're here now – Everythiiiiing........" – hissed that chick with the sensually slipped strap on her cocktail dress.
She broke out into the air, threw herself into a sea of blinding snow. The lead of fir branches...
Dreams flogged with switches.
Her feet felt the strength flowing with blood and readiness to run, run headlong from this stale hell.
She had to wake up. Kira had to wake up.

THE ETERNITY

Every glance quietly hides as Eternity
in the labyrinths of your pupils.

Tender hands untouched by fatigue,
daily scars not yet stitched into warm cheeks.

Eternity will pass before you say: "Forgive me..."
Roses will wither. Orchids will shed their petals.

One day pearl stems will wrap around you whole.
Like rings on fingers – nectars of their sweet resin.
You'll feel Eternity. She'll touch your lips,
grow warmer, and your word will forget belonging.

Something will happen, spill like ocean
over granite's endless shore.
Something will happen.
June will draw you with its scorching sting.

Frozen days... Eternity – she tempts.

22.06.2001 ●

February had already begun. Each day of this February was questioningly bleak and full of irritated egoism. Spring was already creeping quietly across the sky in a light-blue silk "Triumph" slip with the finest lace of clouds.

She could only guess at the ever-approaching catastrophe, Her Catastrophe. She waited for the irreversibly coming destruction, destruction to the foundation and beyond, uncompromising destruction not subject to appeal, like a death sentence.

The ice-crusted snow, long covered with filth on the pavements, evoked nothing but disgust, only adding some sickly wariness to her step, slowing her path into yet another weekday nowhere.

The biting wind pierced her face, billowing her blue-black curls barely covered by a scarf.

Her premonitions were of an absurd, incoherent, but therefore intensely vivid nature, like the hallucinations of a patient floating above a couch that had long ago caved in the floor under the weight of illness.

The thaw at the end of January had behaved deceitfully, as usual.

This was how she met February. This was how Van Gogh once met his youth in London.

Принадлежность дневных сомнений
Принимает ночной оборот
И протягивает решенье
Снова задом, да, наперёд.

Ты не делаешь то, что должно,
Не рассчитываешься - а надо.
Лишь дерьмо в толстый слой шоколада
Упаковываешь надежно.

Психосникерс, лети-ка ты в мусор!
Здесь все сами себе Айболиты,
И Газлайтеры, и Абьюзеры.
Начиненные в край динамитом.

Тыщу раз говорил, Матильдыч, я скоро буду.
Тыщу раз, вырываясь, сбегал и бежал гулять.
Слава Богу, Мы больше уже никогда не будем...
Слава Богу, я так далеко, и завтра мне рано вставать.

"За чертою другого города ..." -
Вновь читаю любимую Льдову.
Если стала я Здесь вайб кодером,
Снова дурой я стать не готова.
(От слова совсем. И без слова.)

Слишком далёкий берег.
Но ты заходи, если че. Я без обид, все было давным давно.
Только борща не подам
И не отсыплю денег -
И скажешь ты мне по итогу, что все здесь - г..вным г...вно.

В бою до конца за почести
Прикоснуться к иной реальности.
Только все это - мелким почерком,
Водостоком в ливневки катится.

Ливни, ливни, ливни в Панама сити...
Солнце, солнце, солнце и спаянная духота...
Только вот Тут ни жарко - ни холодно
(Лола права).

Тут Сердце - Театр без зрителей.
И в проволоку колючую - Обрезанные в нем все, все, все провода.... ●

Море волнуется раз.
Море волнуется два.
Наживка с крючка сорвалась.
Я шлепнулась и уплыла.
Ты решил бросить тогда,
Ты ведь так сильно устал.
Честно читал тамада
Высоцкого. Пел Лесоповал.
Ты помнишь, по Бродскому, Смерть -
Это равнины. Так вот.
Уж очень хотелось доесть
Весь ровненький бутерброд,
Что вечно падает вниз
Маслом, блять, как назло.
А то, что по Бродскому - Жизнь,
У алкашей - "Г.У.ЗЛ.О."
Море волнуется раз.
Море волнуется два.
Доченька родилась.
Зайчики по куполам
Скачут, вещают весну,
Хоть и январь в полный рост,
Слепит и льёт бирюзу
Солнце на мерзлую ось.
Ну же, зайчата, скорей
Прыгайте в рваный рюкзак,
С вами за столько морей
Светлее чужбины мрак.
Вновь лужи рябят тоской,
Вновь ветра брезгливая бязь.
За брызги, прости, дорогой...
Весенняя в море грязь.

Снисхождение до вырожденья,
До порога крутого в меня.
Я встречаю своё день рождения
Из огня да опять в полымя.
Слава Боже, не в то воскресенье.
Руки сломаны, нечем прощать.
Это вербное - как решенье
По утру снова всех разьебать.
Я хватаю свой старенький Глокси
И безмозгло прессую курок.
Всё терпение сжато до злости -
Пристрели, раз ударить не смог.
Лицедейные пялим маски,
И по люксу - тату на плече.
Suum cuique размажет все сказки,
Что AI нарисует в блокчейн.
Дожираю сухие остатки,
Грузом падая на кровать.
По утру снова прыг в полустанки,
В них так весело путь продолжать.
Пробегает порочная кривда
Грязью в князи, из бляди в блядь.
Все, что сдохло во мне, в ком-то живо,
Правых висельников не снять.
Нету места в твоем Королевстве,
Ты на вольной земле, я вот тут.
Я люблю тебя, мальчик из детства,
Славно спаянный проститут.
Берегу твою куклу Вуду,
Гвозди вбиты в повинный висок,
Акварельные незабудки
На погостах прокуренных строк.
Снисхождение в отраженье
В лужах сочных кривых зеркал.
Ты, мой мальчик, остыл в своей тени,
Так смешно и надолго застрял.
Повторяя глотки Килиана
Из пригоршней Её волос,
Я Ей, миленький, так и не стану.
И без водки не тот "On the Rocks".
Может встретимся, статься, однажды,
Перекурим в лиловый рассвет,
Перекрестимся в ход распродаже,
В тихой грусти плетет Сорокет.
Закольцуешься чьим-то мужем.
Я останусь: ничьей женой,
Атуоной, горбатой старушкой
В целом с Богом и чуть - с Сатаной.

Я прощаюсь с тобой, милый Гений.
Ты не злой и не добрый. Ты - Джин из бутылки.
Я прощаюсь, за тенью сомненья,
Молча бросив костыль на развилке.
Мы с тобой столько пропили истин,
Подыхая на отходняках,
И гоняли Агату Кристи
На заснеженных кораблях.
Моя Беркут ждала у тарелки,
Обещала ей, скоро вернусь.
Расползалась метелью в похмелке
Старой сказки Январская Грусть.
Моя Беркут осталась в Бокете,
Оставляю твой R.I.P. для себя.
Нету лучше собаки на свете.
Звонко лаяла, молча любя.
Я прощаюсь с тобой, милый Гений.
Жизнь по-трезвому не описать.
Принимая сухое решенье
Just for ODAT, твою мать.

Были, друг, мы когда-то дети.
Вместо нас теперь, вон, кресты.
В этой долбаной эстафете
Победили не я и не ты.
Победили голодные бдетели
И блюстители чистоты -
Снова пробуя меф с добродетелью,
Жрут яичницу из инсты.
Раскидаем по моргам шкуры.
Эта фабрика - Круглосут.
Плачут умные, плачут дуры -
Чей-то ж были мы, блять, Абсолют!...
Все запомнили нас красавцами,
С оголтелыми, дерзкими мышцами,
Что так честно умели трахаться,
Даже с кем-то делиться смыслами.
Оставляя от нас на память
Что-то вот из карманов джинс,
Ну давай же не будем хаять
Нашу вечную, братка, жизнь.

Моя бабушка больше не снится,
Не ругает меня, на чем свет.
Накуриться бы мне и напиться,
Только я говорю себе: нет.
Эти давние, ржавые спицы
Проникают сквозь тысячу лет.
Разогнаться бы мне и убиться,
Отослав всем далекий привет...
Только я возвращаюсь в столицу,
Там в комоде лежит пистолет,
И завернутый в плащаницу
Вечной жизни обратный билет.

Куда уходит детство?
Куда ушло оно?
К ребятам по соседству,
Где можно пить вино.
Куда уходит правда?
Куда ушла она?
Где можно быть пиздатой
И сладкой без вина.
Куда уходят бляди?
Куда ушли они?
Где в Ламбах Добрых Дядей
"Спаси и Сохрани".
Однажды неизбежно
Уходит и Она
Без Веры и Надежды
Излюблена до Дна.

Фасады лопнули.
В надрыве стены.
Мы дружно хлопали, Вскрывая вены,
И нервным датчиком
Прозябших мыслей
Ловили зайчиков
На льду от виски.
Стоим как вкопаны
В Поток столбами.
Все дружно схлопнуты
В Его Канбане.
На перестанице
Закроем шторки.
Мы, братик, пьяницы
С тобой. И только.
Но только разница
В шальном колыме.
Ты криво дразнишься,
Не мной любимый.
На память Сашенька
Приходит снова.
Вдвоем не страшно нам.
Читаем Льдову.
Стежками ровными,
Сшивая вены,
Нутро Бескровное
Жрет Суперменов.

За пределами жадной тоски,
Что сжирает остатки от Сэлфа,
Плавно я, всем хуям вопреки,
Новой пешкой иду в королеву.
В Зазеркалии бархатном дна,
Где Алиса расстелет осколки,
Курит вейп наш ночной Сатана,
Дым кольцуя в разбег некрологам.
Эх как хочется жадно любить
Эту рваную, хлюпкую душу,
И немедленно хуй бы забить,
Чтоб покой наш глухой не нарушить.
Я отчаянно правлю стишки,
Те, которые рифмой не бились,
Нет ни жалости в них, ни тоски,
И любви тоже нет, вся сблядилась.
Посмотри на меня, мой отец,
Как бескрылая, в небо вползаю.
Моей повести трезвый конец
Из сюжета Тебя вырезает.

Здравствуй, друг, мне бы к тебе прикоснуться легонько, чуть-чуть,
Но так дорого стоит это тепло, выше всяких валют,
Чтобы вычурно гнать 240 и ебнуться заживо в самую ветхую суть:
Эта дикая пустошь в твоих глазах есть Простой Абсолют.
Здравствуй, друг! Мне так хочется правду, что ещё дышит, за жабры скорей достать,
Но нутро её давит подлее и жёстче, все загоняя подошвой под ноги.
Мне так хочется в плечи тебе, вне себя, всю себя разрыдать,
Но я снова и снова лишь хрипло завою у твоего порога.
Может как-нибудь статься молча мы перекурим в закат,
Мне тебя не обнять, я на нижней земле, ты на верхней, нет места в твоем Королевстве,
И так дорого стоят, дороже Роз Нуар Дроптэйла в неведомо сколько крат
Твои отпечатки мыслей в моих первоснежных стихах, будто волчьи следы они все бегут и плетут узоры где-то со мной по соседству...

Прости меня, мама, не вышла в Мэсси,
Запускает салют и разводит мосты
Недовыстроганная поэтесса
С проповедницей, блять, крипты.
Я изменница авторской внешности,
Итерации не в высоте.
Засыпая, не с теми, успешными,
Просыпаемся в нищете.
Что тебе от меня останется?
Два самойловских корабля,
Без которых самой капитанница
Не смогла бы начать с нуля.
Снова в студии дым коромыслом,
Утро в Пензе, в Панаме ночь,
Ну не Мэсси, пускай нфтишница -
Галеристка. Люблю тебя, мама. Дочь.

Холодные пустыни теплых чувств.
Ты плюнул - я ответила: Научусь.
Ты двинул движей, я вкурила их Пустошей.
Теперь это просто обкуренная Мишень.
Что было, то было.
Теперь ты учись, Ничей.
Теперь это обнятый Океан из ничейных Ножей.
Живи и Умри, как ты можешь,
Завидный Ничей,
И можеть быть вспомнишь,
Как Шить из обшивок свой Чейн.

Несвоевременные радости,
Жги, малыш, то, что осталось нам.
Не в суеверьи и беспощадности
Я дарю тебе Адидасности:
Кепки, майки и охуелости -
Хватит тебе, запоздалому,
Очерку, небывалому
В моей железной нежности.
Ты, сумеречная в Адике, Господи, дай ему разума,
Не позабыть в экстатике,
Своего безучастного.
Сила ведь в том, что справится,
Гнида, и перевертится,
Только ведь Ты - Адидасница,
Будешь одна - не женится.
Он не умрет, не спятится,
Много ли нас, поверженных?
Только какая разница
- тихо залаять в бешенстве.

Я не собранная, не разобранная,
Просто ебаная - не доебаная.
Так бывает по поворотице - где-то срулишь, а где - беспутица,
Только канувшим в одиночество, там безлюдица, безрассудница.
Ты платок подними, красавица, кто ты грешная, сколько маешься?
Это путчина вешняя кается, что тебя не казнила, дразнится.
Что бредешь ты унылая по полю,
Всюду глаз свой бросаешь голенький,
Ты же знаешь, гнедая
Оленька,
Нету в пустоши, на растопольи,
Все того, что тебе мечтается,
Лютой праздности - манекен.
Кто-то любит, а кто-то дразнится,
Помнишь фразочку, супермен?

Что над крышей? Мышь луну жрет - свой сыр.
Милый мальчик, ты у Ветлицкой – до дыр.
Мы не утопленники, да не утопленники, просто в пизду
Как то все умудрились мы разом послать звезду.
Вот и все. Нынче срезалась резко наша постель.
На углы твоих женщин, в квадратах моих менял.
А Ветлицкая «ну только не говори мне, что любишь меня».
Помни ты - не один, ни в один не один.
И вокруг аксиома: ты милый не рой до дыр,
Ведь карманы прорвутся,
И мышам не хватит на сыр!
На луну не полезем больше -
Нет там кайфов -
Только пахучий уж очень дымок от вчерашних слов.
Все чертоги, чертоги, нам дитятко, лей молока -
Лучше сразу до дна -
Обучаться прожить слегка,
Ибо иначе просто заездить шест,
Кто-то первым не съест, а за кем - заподло доесть.
Кто-то будет свой крест, будто нож, нанизать в рукава -
Нынче полночь сынок,
А Ветлицкая снова права.

Жизнь - целое, проблятое, но целое.
Твоего ребенка жизнь отдала за бесценок.
И теперь он будет купаться в этом, подделка,
Жизни той, что не продают, а мы с тобой!!!
Ели счастье, солнышко, друг мой!!
Обьедались друг другом за разом!!
Вот такая вот блять проказа.
Солнышко, иди, сука, на хуй.

На удивленье благость - злость.
Там где ты в отчаянье металась -
У кого-то метко удалось!
Ты, сидишь, отчаявшись за мраком,
По стропилам возвратившись в ночь...
Для тебя вся жизнь была атака,
А ему поднять свой зад невмочь.
Ты сидишь, пуская кольца дыма,
Зная, что и дым тебе - не друг.
Это лишь смешная пантомима
Клоунов из кобелей и сук.
Так давно не плавилась душонка
У прямого, ясного огня.
Вот уж здесь льняная распашонка
Для тебя, дружочек, для тебя.
Ты уйдешь, и, глазом не моргнувши.
Как же лихо ты сумел прожить!
Надышавшись и не задохнувшись!
Натоптавши, землю раздавить.
Я с тобой едва ль, дружок, знакома,
Мне хватает жидких глаз твоих,
Я листок рванула из альбома,
И взяла короткий передых.
Что ты смотришь, гладя и лаская,
Синеву холодной сединой.
Ты - не Авель, но и я - не Каин,
Вместе нам с тобой не заодно.

И ни со зла, и никак.
Просто некая точность -
Словно старый наждак,
Мне истерший кожу.
Я лишь бежала к тебе -
Всю этажность минуя.
Я выгорала в тебе,
Уже кожи не чуя.
Я добивала Жизнь, что болела.
Вот и не справилась я -
Этажи против тела.
Ты - это лучшее, как ни банально звучит.
Бродский сказал, Жизнь - холмы.
Ну а Ты - Сгоревший.
Ты - моя боль, поток тошных дней уставших.
Славная роль отчей и не отчавших.
Все, что истлело, пусть развеется днем.
Мы и без тела с тобой еще допоем.

Прошлое гаснет за недостачей.
Ты засветил. А я замаячила.
Все, что мы сделали, абзачило, так звенело, гудело,
А мы просто значились.
Что попутали, дрожью в карманы пряча?
Нам не хватит на ром, только водка со сдачей.
Где мы, сволочи, круто так озадачились?
Не сорите в публику старыми клатчами.
Это ношено. Это драное.
Ты на ройсе. Я на диване.
Развлекайся, милый, погода -
Вся как есть. Дождь. Твои отходы.
Все же здорово, только блевать отвартно.
Плачем с Осиным у автомата.

Вьются шальные повести
В грустном дыму Собрания.
Нет ни стыда, ни совести -
Гасишься покаянием.

Пули, развилки, Зиночки,
Гонки и пистолетики,
Гнется гнедая спиночка,
Ловит ебло приветики.

Покуролесим, миленький,
Ты, один хуй, без вариков!
Я нацепила бриллики.
В радиоволнах - Маликов.

Топнем! Движи невнятные,
Скоро мы снова кончимся,
И нет пути обратного
В омуте одиночества...

В сажу, без стука, исподволь,
Вмажу тебя, любимого,
Прям, как у Аллы Борисовны,
Голубя сизокрылого...

Даришь цветочек аленький,
По бездорожью скорости
Мается крестик маленький...
Ведь ни стыда, ни совести.

Так пустить бы по венам жар...
Но все плещется полутьма...
Ты - наверное - Божий дар.
Я - наверное - "Я сама".

И, наверное, вопреки,
И, наверное, с полуслова,
"Я люблю" - шум немой реки,
Дважды топящей всех готовых.

Верни мне чуть больше себя,
Растраченного за зря,
И мачту от корабля,
Что проебал якоря.

Сегодня нас - во вчера!
Ни пуха нам, ни пера!
Возьмет, очевидно, ничья
Нутром из сволочья.

И спорить нам ни к чему.
Я точно свое возьму.
Сегодня я у руля,
Иконы свои смоля.

Потом будем вместе стыть
И как-то на мели плыть.
Частушки, обеты, треп...
Воспользуюсь правилом "Стоп".

Апокалипсис в новом раскладе.
Без огня дым - бывает такое!
На Гальяно, при полном параде,
Даже имя сегодня другое.

Нет на то объективной причины,
Чтоб не смог тебя жестко трахнуть.
Ну, Тоска, раздевайся, блядина!
Густо налита кровью заводь.

Что ж так рвешься в мой плен суровый?
Ну же, с плеч приспусти бретели...
Ради Бога, не будь хладнокровна,
Убивая меня в постели!

Ей так хочется прыгнуть на горло,
Придушить, и кольцо - на палец.
Эта проблядь - Тоска, как ворон,
Свадьбы ждет, чтобы мне отдаться.

Умиляет вторая декада.
Время ищет мозги в циферблате.
Наша осень прошла пиздато -
Так, в любезностях вся, на отврате.

А румянец блефует на платье,
Шелком выплеснут на покрывало.
Ускорение темпа в возврате...
Мысль в утробе себя потеряла.

Колкий иней, застывший на спицах...
Стая птиц, что ты раньше не встретил.
Век свечи, чтоб скорей растопиться,
Растекается в вязком моменте.

И так хочется снова по встречной,
Чтоб тотально и напрочь разбиться!
Звездный путь превращается в Млечный...
Эх, как жаль, не успеть покреститься!...

Ржавые мифы по лезвию.
Тупится новая бритва.
Сродни с ума сошествию
Моим губам молитва.

Сколько же выпито вечности,
Двигаюсь в очевидности.
Я вся как есть безупречная -
Мутные разновидности.

Жизнь - лишь холмы по Бродскому.
Ровный расход не срастается.
Я все с тобой по-скотски,
А твой хребет не сгибается.

Мойры шарят по окнам,
Пряжу ткут в занавесках,
В пляс, с разбега и грохнут
Мостовые до треска.

Ночь рисует им похоть
В этажах и перилах.
Грайи дружно подохнут,
От тоски обессилев.

Задремавшей Неве
Небо Лондона снится,
Генеральской Вдове
Корча свежие лица.

Скурит Мейфэр под фильтр
Ее бледные мысли,
Честен, наг и небрит,
Жрет ее бескорыстно.

Что ж ты, мальчик, как Лель,
Пастушок на свирели...
Я не верю в капель
В омерзевшем апреле.

Церкви, загсы и цепи,
Похоронные марши,
Жены, байки из склепа,
Блядь одна другой краше...

Навещу-ка ублюдков
Я непрошеным гостем,
Загляну на минутку,
Отгуляв на погосте!

Печалиться повремени!
Хотя уж коченеют пальцы.
Дожить, чтоб наголо отдаться
Кому-то в шкуре без брони.

Печалиться повремени!
Хоть бой в висок куранты - вьюгой..
Себя ты отдала подругой,
В ответ - растраченные дни.

Печалиться повремени!
Хоть вилы - в кровь, дорога - в счастье!
Ты как-то, детка, не случалась...
Случись теперь из западни.

Печалиться повремени!
Покуда нужно постараться,
Чтоб вскрыться, нужно открываться,
Но дрожь в руках, и бритва - в гниль.

Печалиться повремени!
Открой - закрой свой шкаф постылый!
Хоть Ад и кажется немилым,
Ты там не пропадай, звони...

Застывшее в полости дна
Это, ты видимо, но не она.
Она крячится сеткой рваной, достать тебя
А ты, камыш, ловишь ее, чтоб тебя из изпозднего никогда.

Сколько таких видели, камышей
Столько умерших, вышивших странных мышей,
Кто, подыхая, читал, я люблю тебя, мышь,
Но ни слога не молвил, о том, что сгоришь.

Что ж вы за дети, утопшие в синеве,
Наглох затекшие в этой испатине,
Мне это дивно и отвратительно
Кой же век вы отчизне родители?

Ты сказал: "Иди на х...й!!!"
А я просто устала...
Застегнувшись с запАхом,
Шла Душа с Карнавала.

Ей - ни тени сомненья,
В том, что шаг станет твердым.
Но раз встав на колени,
Ты навеки разодран.

Так, Душа, не шатаясь,
Сжав в кулак правосудье,
Шла бегОм, зарекаясь:
"Карнавала не будет!!!".

Поцелуя не жду. Губами
Расцелую я лед на стеклах.
Поутру завьюжит снегами.
Друг от друга мы вновь продрогнем.
Наверху, над церквей куполами,
Кто-то крылья сцепив, поспешает...
Ты - фартовый. Ходи тузами.
Я - врагами. Пускай не мешают.
Сладких снов недосмотренных стая
Все кружит, приземляясь на лицах...
Мы друг друга с тобой листая,
Тихо сгинули в экспозициях.

"Не заплачу никогда!" -
То ли принцип, то ли кредо?
Ты прозвал весенним бредом
Слезы треснувшего льда.
Убежать? Не разогнался!
Проистечь? Источник сух.
Обсчитав, сам просчитался
И с немым остался глух.
С раздражением мяча,
Отстучавшего по полу,
Звонким был, пока был молод,
Но паршиво так звучал...
Как ни складно, не в ладах
Своенравные потери
С клятвой, принятой на веру:
"Бога Дьяволу продам!"
"Не заплачу никогда...",
Но слеза вдруг до упора
Жмет на тормоз разговора
Струйкой стаявшего льда.

Рябины зябнущие грозди.
Закат в золе.
И гнутся, разгораясь, звезды
К нагой земле.
Зачем пришел? Давно уж розданный
Другим, не мне...
Что ж, будешь гостем этой осенью
В Моей Стране.
Вмиг ночь истомная расхристана
Вся, догола.
Казненным будешь ты без милости,
Сгоришь до тла!..

Я тебя не найду: страждет холст под невзрачною маской...
Робко сорванный луч никнет в вязкой вечерней струе.
Мы боимся кричать то, что в ложь обличаем с опаской,
Мы незваные гости - тропам нашим не слиться в стезе.
И болезненно дым сбросит на пол унылые пляски.
Плеть волос вдруг опустишь на спину в небрежном хвосте.
И не будем шептать лесть без фабулы и без развязки.
Лишь нелепая брань пресно звякнет в глухой суете.

Если ушло - не надо.
Если простить - прости.
Я - та иная Прохлада,
Что на твоем пути.
В этих ума изувечьях,
В этих безумствах чувств,
Мы же давно искалечены,
Но я к тебе вернусь.
Утром дождем холодным,
Памятью сизых лиц,
Буду ли старомодной,
Вуалью седых ресниц?
Ты же так ждал чуть больше
Больше сквозных, сквозь боль,
Будто бы в преисподней ждет нас один пароль.

Когда застенье ты стоишь, глядишь, и, может, показавшись,
себя увидишь, окрестишь, довольно! Век, не навидавшись!
Смотри, смотри себе в лицо!
Там слезы, боль, а ты - терпила,
давай накручивай кольцо,
и жги, хватаясь за перила!

Скоро холодный пот. Скоро - больной черед.
Снова твои следы высохли без воды.
Впитались слезы в стекло.
И что-то вдруг вытекло.
Это верно, душа, вылилась неспеша.

От обиды я могу заплакать,
И соплей могу я утереться,
Если так легко мне в душу харкнуть -
Мне об Это лихо опереться!
Так легко, что вышибу пороги,
О которые пришлось остановиться.
Нам любые дороги дороги -
Там, где ты опять готов родиться.
Так смешно над трелью полустаек,
Что скопясь, тебя сжирают жадно,
Будто все, проснувшись спозаранку,
Вытряхают с перьев дымный ладан.

Зря ты поломал мои крючки. Рыбы не кончают суицидом.
Бабочки, попавшие в сачки, крылья свои сбросят паразитам.
Сколько можно пить и сколько ждать, отстоявши подволе до дрожи!
Умирая, вечно умирать. Спотыкаясь, утыкаться рожей
в полутьму... горящие, не жгут.
Прожигая, гаснущие, тонут.
Мы с тобою вязкий азимут,
где назло и не назло припомнят.
Я тебя крылатая, дождусь,
перьями подушку набиваю.
Зря ты снова сбросил чешую
там, где я тихонечко взлетаю.

Все закончится одиночеством.
Снова.
И с него же начнется.
Имя новое, отчество в честь кого-то дается.
Кто-то - в классики,
Кто-то - в гаджеты,
Кто-то в Финики,
Кто-то в Лады.
Все мы те еще, блять, алхимики.
Войны света, блять,
Как у Коэльо, с битыми латами.
Память куплена,
Но не продана -
Узник веб-казематов,
Виайпи-идиотом
Соней клеит в приватах.
Лучше мигом и с мотика
Или с пулей на мостике,
Чем приклееным к телеку жрать и бить все что под руку,
Коль ебать уж не сладил.
Карты, деньги, стволы,
Бляди, дяди-ослы.
Жены, братики, сестры,
Тупики, перекрестки.
Скоро кончится все ебалово.
Напоследок - атака.
Выйдешь ты на подмостки
Руки жать Пастернаку.

Вперед! Призыв трубит с утра.
Шагай быстрей, тебе пора.
А я сыграю на гармошке:
Пиздуй, Антон, копать картошку!
Меж тем, тихонечко, ползком,
Я выберусь, ушастый гном!
Взгляну по сторонам: увы!
Нет ничего. Чертоги тьмы.
Смотрю, на дерево взобравшись:
Любовь моя, уж наскитавшись,
С картошкой ждет, вздремнуть успела.
И вон душа пошла из тела...
Антошка, не хуй озираться!
Там - Ад, там - Рай! Давай ебаться!...

Скрежет, скрежет, скрежет,
От тебя воротит,
Какая нежность?
Гниль гнильем поросла,
Что тешит?
Чем утешишься,
Коль рассвет забрезжит?
Полосы дальние берега,
Настрогаю, давеча, стерегла,
Для тебя запорожье талое,
Что-то звякнуло запоздалое.
С кем ты пожить свою залечишь,
Кому дашь иль не дашь на вечность?
Ты продажная сука, муж?
Продаешься, я - не продаюсь.
Все как все. Запорожняя жуть.
Целы мы. Только дочь не вернуть.

Я давно не люблю на сдачу.
Просто сдачу за три рубля.
Никогда не жила на удачу,
Вернее, никогда не любила
На сдачу, давайте сначала,
Мне в карман - на удачу,
А дальше - любовь у причала.
Что говорил ты с берегу?
Что мы вместе осилим все Их?
Ты осил Меня вместо этого,
Даже этого не осмыслив.
Все прошло, и моя агония
Превратилась в порочную исповедь,
Я гналась - вот моей погони -
Рваный кокон и я, не искренне,
Рву уж удила лошадей, что увечены,
Загибаются прутьями истины.
Ты прости. Я, наверное, лечена.
Не залечена до бессилия.
Что с того, что асфальт обрушится,
И ты вспомнишь: Вот, воскресение!
Я уже не твоя послушница.
И не твой этот день Рождения.

Сам собою отключишься. Перестанешь противиться.
Вдруг придут почемучества.
Над собою насилия.
Я не гад, что юродствуя,
Перед всеми опОлчившись,
Только тихо безмолвствуя,
Жру свое одиночество.
Жру я так, жто обожратый,
И не проклятый, жру я,
Тихо жру, все, что просрато,
Из отходов от жуликов.
Я лежу, молча капая
На ладонь в преисподнюю.
Мы там все не залапаны,
Сатаной не залуплены.
Скоро я ссатанеевшись,
Обниму, сберегаючи,
То, где я так надеялась,
Там, где ты был палач мне.
Убегая, не прячусь я,
Мы от силы не прячемся,
Лишь горим, не сгораючи,
Лишь горючее плавится
Нам на души, что сгорблены
Словно карлики, шутятся,
Вместе нам в преисподнюю.
Коль закажут полудницу.
Сколько веки слипаются,
Пригибаясь от истины?
Плавно жимолость огибается
В жилы мхов очевидности.
Полустанки и мельницы.
В хлам порочится исповедь.
Отворотившись грешницей,
Ссатанеешься, исподволь.
Что берешь, не считаешься,
Загребаясь в столетия?
Ты так сильно измаялся,
Попадаясь в заклетия.
Только миг, где попутчики,
Только миг, где рассветились.
Мы с тобой неразлучники,
В клетке ждем равноденствия.
Чем мы станемся, чем мы сбылимся,
Раскрещая распятия?
Лишь в оградах распылица
Жизнью век опыляется.

Да, мой товарищ, говорить не о чем,
Либо ты в таре, либо я деревенщина.
Либо каждый из нас в этой драной трещине,
Из которой выхода нет, как из вечности.
Ты походу, крепко затарился,
И замаялся, отходя из копности,
Всех вопросов, что не считаются,
Всех ответов из неготовности.
Что, заблудившись, не покаялся,
Маячок, видимо, вздрогнулся?
Ты - мой давний круг, покатаемся
Прямиком в эту давносподнюю.
Где мой милый, ты так заблудился,
Чем увлекся, спешил, подскользнулся ли?
Мы же давечи преизблудились,
Всем сказали, что безрассудучи,
Расплелись словно косы, на пряди мы,
Наплели пауками две хижины,
Мы, там милый вдвоем останемся.
И, дай Боже, там не заблудимся.
Что в остатке сухом ты впредь скажешь мне?
Что я, видимо, под остатками?
Всех завалин, что по весне,
Просто грязью сгинут под пятками?
Я тихонько молчу, улыбаючись,
Сберегаю свои красноречия.
Ты, возможно, один разнокраючий,
Улыбаешься каждому встречному.
Что, сползая до нитки, не голая,
Не сердечная и не вгревшая
Ни тепла и ни вечного холода,
Остаюсь я навеки застывшая.

На лезвиях, где режут нити, не спеша,
Где шьют и подиумы крутят,
Я вижу, как ты крутишься, душа,
Пока Господь тебя благорассудит.
Теперь я вижу многое в тебе:
Столетия, что пролетели мимо,
И, видимо, нам Шапка, не в судьбе
Искать дано, что заведно незримо.
Как ты, висячая, на мне,
Выдергивала нити из под кожи,
Как стремена трясла на сдохнувшем коне,
Что они, дряхлые, меня стегали дрожью.
Я помню ложь твою, иссякшую давно,
Что ты плевал похмельною жевачкой,
Я помню дичь, что залегла на дно,
Нутро твое - моя теперь наждачка.
Обычный день. И копоти отсель,
Как и вчера, уж не предвижу боле,
Я давняя гнилая канитель.
Ты - роль без роли.
В театре тусклом не зажгут огней,
Отродняя, немыслимая сталость
Тебя во мне, во мне из дней,
Что исподволь нам тихо доживалось.
Давай, дерзай, волшебная Швея,
Иголкой нас пронзи, из перешивок,
Хлама, прочего старья -
Мы канули. Вперед и без ошибок!

Сжальтесь надо мною в этот раз.
Много ль их таких и безнадежных,
Ладаном разит иконостас.
Черти истоптали Вашу рожу.
Что ж Вы так читаете навзрыд
Мне свой приговор кривой-и-косый?
Будто за чертою рядом спит
Ангелок с трубой разноголосой.
Почешите совесть -
Есть гребенка, вся такая ровная на лесть,
Но ведь столько совестей ребенку -
Не вычесать и ни за что не счесть.
Сколько Вы уж падали в осадок
Горьких, кислых, и шипуче-сладких?
Там меня смогли ли Вы достать?
Поищите лучше. Может, взять легче,
Чем разжалобить с устатка.
Дремлете, так лучше уж вздремнуть,
Канув в VSOP благую мягкость.
Что-то где-то тихо потерялось.
Это мне отселе не уснуть.
Сжальтесь надо мною в этот мрак!
Ибо вы не знаете, как жалко,
Было б всех Есенину собак,
Слегших встельку с Вами и вповалку.

Денег не тянет на несколько слов.
Дашь прикурить - и то не готов.
Что ты за червь ? А за несколько слов - ты готов.
Обиды оставишь после руля.
Себя не исправишь, материя.
Но ведь за несколько слов
Ты готов.
Пока не сдох.