Mayakovski's Ghost

When I was a university man, I wanted to burn it all down— the houses, the hymns, the quiet betrayals that looked like family. I wanted flame over form, Molotov over meal, the shattered pane louder than the stained-glass sermon.

Mayakovsky said the streets shall be our brushes. I believed him. Every wall could be rewritten, every mouth refitted with a siren.

I wore rage like a red scarf against the cold of inheritance. Tradition was corruption disguised as sanctity. Religion coated reality like cyanide to a clear blue sky.

But the years… they didn't take the fire instead, they bundle up beside it, whispering of soft memories and my son's contagious laughter.

Now I want to make it all better. Not the world as it is, but the world as it might still be if someone sat long enough to thread the torn seams.

Now I find beauty in the careful patch, the hand that reaches back, the father who waits instead of vanishes.

I still carry the match. But I use it to light candles, to warm small rooms, to write poems to my son in the soft hush after rage has gone quiet.

Mayakovsky would not approve. But maybe, somewhere, his ghost is tired too.