If his damage is vertical, it rises as floors do

sidescan TVs and tables, shatterwards of beds

and chequered bedspreads hanging out among

the shrapnel hovering like glass or killer birds.

Then falling into gutters. Oh, people, you’ll die.

Imagination is horizontal, it levels everything

reaching to the Tsar, his sense of time is flat.

When he breathes, centuries move backwards.

Most of the time he doesn’t. He is impassive,

blanker than a drone above the broken ground.

Raisin-eyed, a man among men (not women)

bare and hairless-chested upon his poor horse

yet a mummy’s boy from the first to the last

of his Mother Russia: he was born twice over

into the 20th … then the 18th century as well.

A double case of repetition, there is nothing

to see in him, he is the enigma of bad acting:

Putin is the personality without a person.

Among their medals: loyalty as much as battle

weighing them down at the far end of the table,

his Generals watch him: cold, pouty as a baby,

yet this terrible, unavoidable vice of his lips.

Immobile he sits there like a dull Villanelle

lobotomised with power: Glabrous Lobotomous.

Philip Salom