🔑 Oil Painting 🙏🏻

“Before us: an oil painting —
Repin himself could take some pride in it,
Drawn in black paint —
A composite portrait”… of projection.
How precisely the figure’s contours are traced — spot on, down to the last bit,
Baggy, antediluvian, subcultural paraphernalia.
All that’s missing: a basketball, an Onyx cap, a bottle with a hole in it,
Fighting dogs, a spray-paint can…
And “A” — as if conceived in a test tube —
Vintage nineteen-ninety-five or thereabouts,
A little stupid, a little ridiculous,
But basically our own blood brother… Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

Attribution: the opening passage adapts Oxxxymiron’s first round in the Versus Battle Oxxxymiron vs ST.

In an oversized “rapper tee” I ran away from the gardens of Eden,
I always bought things to grow into — that feeling was, like, a stimulus.
Everything that once seemed huge gets small with time.

Left the house — tschüss, Paradise.
Forever searching for the spell: Eins, Zwei.

Between ideas and practice

“There’s a gap between ideas and practices” — that’s the zone of proximal development 😄
Or was Lev against practices like these?

Yeah, I don’t feel the canons, as if my feelings were under chloroform in algodice,
I don’t believe the orthodox, as if it were nixelpixel.
And I think at twenty-five it’s shameful to live inside somebody else’s paradigm,
and I believe that on my own road I’ll become the hero of the narrative,
but first I need to sort out what my Shadow has spawned here. 🔎

“You strive to conquer, not to love.
And when you are in love, you feel defeated.”

Yes, that’s true! I’m afraid of close relationships,
because they can wound me right under the wing,
and then I’ll crawl along the ground
like millions of those Pierrots. 💍

And my sadistic character — that’s armor, that’s scales;
it has saved me before from the problem of Being.
But at least I learned the lesson: always rely on myself,
don’t run after the f*cking crowd, listen to myself……

🤢 Though I could have learned this instead:
that I will always be loved,
that there’s no need to search for unique roads,
all I need is to be friends with everyone and drift with the current.
Do whatever the people want,
chase trends, cling to memes, hashtags and brands…
Adapter. Opportunist…

But no! I would rather die a Human Being
than live knowing I am a Monster. 🤮

“But you know, nobody used to believe in me.
Still I went against the current straight toward the gates of Hell,
skidding through the turns, doing everything the other way round.” 🎤

Then I searched for myself in book dust,
and then I dropped far below zero. 📉
This isn’t a pen trial and these aren’t empty words
(although, yeah, they’re Oxy’s words).

And I would’ve croaked, but now I’ve got a small family.
I wanted so badly to belong to something bigger than Me.
There’s also faith in myself here,
and on the horizon there’s only one goal — psychology. 🎯

I write so my brain activity doesn’t drop,
Even though dementia is far away — or maybe it’s close,
(or maybe it’s online).

And to hell with all that confidentiality;
I sure wasn’t bound by it in psychotherapy,
because I was on the other side of the barrier.

The generation of kids from little VKontakte
probably won’t understand a thing — and that’s the tactic.
Because in that “rapper tee”
you have to know the textSTYLE 🙇‍♂

Thank you, Irina Nikolaevna:
for that feedback,
for me it’s cashback,
but now it’s already a flashback,
because carpe diem was January 2!