Centralian

The soil is boiling.

Noxious fumes rise from fissures.

Ice cubes and air-fresheners 

Are thrown down from the mansion windows

And we are expected to go to war.

To war, where we will get to be

    Harvested by machine guns,

    Throttled by creeping yellow-green,

    And drowned in ice

        While our blackened feet fall to pieces.

Blind old Nikolai

Can't see the flames

Burning behind the thousand-yard-staring eyes

Sunken into one hundred million hollow faces.

    Hollow faces etched into the night

    By the glow of mortar blasts

    And factory fires.

He revels in ineptitude

While our agonizing joy

Is found in the next teasing grey sunrise

As we seek to one day return

To the torn and tear-dampened recollections in our pockets.

While a colonel weeps into a photograph,

    The wife of his brother weeps into a telegram

        As her cousin is getting his vocal cords clipped out in the streets of Petrograd

            And his father is being eviscerated upon factory gears.

Yes, Nikolai;

The soil is boiling

And I will live, I must live

If only to see the day

That it crumbles beneath you.