Matthew Caretti

On Reading The Communist Manifesto
Aboard the Trans-Siberian Express

The book's propositions as grand as the landscapes. Each an exacting beauty. Yet rail side towns now rust and rot. Here questions of rule and ownership have become irrelevant. The discontented were once sent this way to lose their passions. Only gaunt forests of birch and the Monet-flowered fields of summer to sustain them.

taiga sun
old spires lean
into clouds

The locomotive continues to move through time and space. Through Marx and Engels' "idiocy of rural life." But the book is soon tattered and worn, the ideas already fading. These great distances dilute any sense of possession or understanding. Certainly of belonging.

a babushka
sickles her garden
last house in town