don't see life's reputed brighter side.
I'm wary even of my close companions.
Friendship is vacuous. I'm just
a piece of shit washed up by a filthy tide.
A hospital is bombed. Refugees are raped.
Everywhere corruption, lies and greed.
Seeing is revulsion, hearing is white noise.
To do evil seems to be our guiding creed.
I know Philosophy's corrupt and love is self-deceit -
just smoke and mirrors. Hope's another
universal cause of misery. I am lucky to have fun
in living, I'm not crushed by futility.
I'll have a body-bag, please - no winding-sheet.
Igor Vasilyevich Lotaryov (1887-1941) was a St Petersburg poet who presided over the circle of 'Ego-Futurists', and admired - even looked like - Oscar Wilde.
The Verlaine of fin-de-siècle Russia, 'Severyanin' was one of the first poets to leave Russia after the October Revolution. He settled in Estonia in 1918, then tried to return to Russia shorttly afterwards, but could not because of the civil war, marriage to a local girl, unreceptive literary climate, etc.
Severyanin died from a heart attack in Russian-occupied Tallinn, several decades after his reputation had been dissolved by the Soviet optimism which ended in capitalist infection.
The last 2½ lines of the above poem are mine, not Severyanin's.
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