[Verse 1: Bi-2]
Black rye bread
Breaks a blunt knife.
Eyes stare
At a blurred horizon.
Straight from the ceiling
The silent rain falls-
A line running
Across the spine of a book.
[Chorus: Bi-2]
The cities are burning
With foreign love.
The winding path
Has dragged on like a noose.
When all roads
Lead nowhere,
The time has come
To return home.
[Verse 2: Bi-2]
A noisy crowd
Filled the railway platform
And from behind the glass
A boy still waves to me.
Every fate
Is tied up with me.
A house long since demolished
Still lives in my memory.
[Chorus: Bi-2]
The cities are burning
With foreign love.
The winding path
Has dragged on like a noose.
When all roads
Lead nowhere,
The time has come
To return home.
[Verse 3: Oxxxymiron]
It’s hard to save one who flees towards death
Cypresses, palms, blue skies and sunburns are not armor
Here they pronounce monsoon differently, the landscapes are like dreams,
But how can we stop yearning for somewhere we are not?
Here it may not be comfortable, but it’s not Lefortovo 1
But you stubbornly wait to be teleported home, to inject
The old formula, in a childhood home without Ordnung2
Here you’ve seen everything: the mines of Dortmund and cliffs of Cornwall
The Morlock herds from slums in early books of Orwell. 3
A wanderer’s map is on his palm, until the ties to point A are broken
But a lump scratches his throat, part time work as a porter,
A glass of vodka with Cinzano…
What the hell is there to do if the heart conquers the mind,
When you're completely tired of being a stepson among natives?
Paradise is behind, but alas, we are kamikazes-
The world of gas chambers is ahead,
The army of Vlasov4, mass executions, but
Everything pulls back, wait, we’re entering our native antimatter
What's there to do, to say “stop?”
To give up and write under the table?
To chicken out, to fear that you’ll die here like an immigrant's vocabulary
Without real live speech in your native tongue
You thought you could survive without it, but the distance doesn’t shrink
You thought it would pass, it was nothing, distance heals, but
Your language hasn’t changed at all, kamo gryadeshi?5
See, Icarus, lay your hands on your forehead
Behind you cockroaches run, behind you are Paris and Istanbul
Three hundred grams of cognac, the plane flies higher and suddenly spins
Over a point over a cape- go down, my friend, and there-
[Chorus: Bi-2]
The cities are burning
With foreign love.
The winding path
Has dragged on like a noose.
When all roads
Lead nowhere,
The time has come
To return home.
The cities are burning
With foreign love.
The winding path
Has dragged on like a noose.
When all roads
Lead nowhere,
The time has come
To return home.
1. A Moscow torture prison2. German for “rigorous order”3. Actually a reference to H.G. Wells.4. a Nazi cooperator5. Bulgarian for “where do you come from?”