***

You didn't let us in.

And how did this happen?
It's very simple:
We weren't invited anywhere except this place,
Or the price of the invitation was too high,
Nowhere were we expected, not met, not loved,
And only there, truly, are we welcome,
In that place that is nowhere.

But we were eager to get into your prison of reality, wimps,
And God is my witness, we put a lot of effort into it,
But we didn't even pass the face control at the entrance.
Is anyone dreaming of escaping from it?
It’s not true, there’s no way to push them out of the prison gates even with kicks.
Space prisons are such that there is nothing beyond their gates for former prisoners.
Because there are no prisoners beyond the gates.
At most, some kind of residual mirage
About some narrow alley with a lantern,
With chasms at the beginning and at the end,
And therefore, a place that is nowhere to be found,
This is too difficult a route for someone who is not there.
But still
I recognized the alley with the lantern, the wind is like in a chimney there
Eternal night and a public post box is hanging.
Do you want to send a letter? But where?
Well, I was there, but I forgot the name of the street.

Nabokov, why did you climb in here with your deathly smile hidden in the heavy cold of a bouquet of lilies of the valley? I was talking about something completely different.
About the same thing? And is there a definition of "the same thing" for a place that is not even anywhere?
Identity is determined by the presence of absence. The contours must coincide.
A contour is someone else's memory, as long as they remember? Did you lie? And how can you not be ashamed?
Well, for God's sake. Now it's started again.
Look, Blok is already dragging himself past his lantern and his drugstore.

These scraps of night city alleys are scraps of a map of a place that is nowhere to be found.
And there is no map either.
I say, there is a dead end on these streets to the right and to the left, and how long can you walk back and forth along them like a night patrol?
Ouija, get in the car, I am really tired of these sad pedestrians. The muffler is broken, of course,
that is a great success here.