Twin 20-floor Tower Blocks

Stand like space-invader screen assemblage

Exhaled by soviet revolution

Rooted, now, like digital virus

In the lungs of Jugla

At the shore Devil’s Ezera.

(In graffiteed and abandoned garage, like a thought on a notepad rotting in cellar, is a caravan with empty tyres and mouldy windows. It sports in cheerful italics a declaration of an optimistic party-goer now preserved cryogenically ‘Free Time!”)

Computer monitors

Half submerged

In stagnant shore

Will Not Rot

<<Jugla smird, Cyka!>>

Jo this is where

All that breath of technology 

Came to die

An anthropologist

Has to understand

Like a biologist

Understands the lungs

Look, there, someone erected some stained glass

In a first-floor window

And a Spanish man

With blonde wife

And son, probably not from 

His cum

Opens the door.

Greenhouse frames rot in neglected back yard, their plēve smothering dead weeds.

Opposite a man and a woman, both in their 40s, 

Fags in hand, 

Stand either side of a pile of stout, fresh, timber,

Laughing with a little heart,

Breath flavoured with smoke and eye creases.

In foreground, Russian man

Exhalation visible

Speaks words to coax response

From other Russian man

Conversation falls gently

Over new generation 

Toddling from one attraction to the other.

In background, two swans

In the eternal mature elegance of animal

Grace the water with their beak.

Towards me approaches technocrat man-child

Outside

By himself

He catches my eye

And removes mask,

Nodding perceptibly.

Adds to cloud conglomeration

Living and spoken congestion

Listfully and wistfully

Settling over Devil’s Lake.