I’ve got a Mayakovsky headache going right now
Watch a Vasilyevsky buskersinging Tsoi
I’d sing along, I don’t know how
Love, hope and daily bread
Or half-baked dreams inside my head
The bastard son of chronology
The past, the present, the future gave birth to me
Under the Neva and on to Nevsky now
Stare through Gogol’s glowing eyes into the shadows and the basements of his town
The modern city killed the night, embalmed it in electric light
The futurists just wrote the last rites
In the Russian night there’s one thing on my mind, it’s on my mind

Mechanised, left out on our own
Tom, when’s God coming home?
We’re enlightened and alone
And that’s why I sit here tonight
In this cheap basement cafe
Where third-hand gold spills from the lanes
Nikolai, your devil lights the lamps
I’d rather stay inside

I saw Bulgakov in a dream the other day
He told me “manuscripts won’t burn, but dig my glowing pipe tobacco fade to grey”
The river runs this whitest night past windows lit by candle light
The dreamless spires of industry
The ghosts of old St. Pete are haunting me
‘Cos the clocks won’t stop for no-one in this town
They run their course like Peter’s horse and
Stamp our sacred days into the ground
Dark clouds, horizon’s end, ink spilled from dead writers’ pens
Down the smoke-filled basement steps
And then the Russian night unfolds beyond the screens
Where nothing’s as it seems...