Drunk in a flat off Nevsky Prospekt.
Telephone ignored — importunate knock at the door.
Escort of four KGB to the street,
their officer from the black ZiL’s backseat,
“Jonah Amitaievitch, a cosmonaut in Leningrad? No.”
Launched here from the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A minor prophet pitched in elliptic orbit
tumbles weightless, swallowed by the Soyuz capsule.
As vacuum tube filaments glow under glass
thoughts detonate down trains of coded visions.
These marvels elated there freely to witness
the atheist light of stars eons below
or tea, black bread, butter & honey.
Whom thrown it seems the choice decays.