night flight

It's 2:30 am
i've already turned off the computer and then remembered, and turned it back on ---
i was going to write this, and only the night time is right for this ---
so it was 1988 i think... in st petersburg, russia --- no wait it was still leningrad --- yes it was
i was sitting in somebody's aprtment listening to an acoustic gig
a would-be cardiologist from siberia
gorgeous jewish-russian boy with more wavy long black hair than you can possibly imagine
he got kicked out of med school for playing guitar, a year short of graduating ---
then harassed by KGB fleeing from city to city
he could play guitar and make it sound like two

his spoken voice the sweetest loveliest sound i ever heard -- it's like he spoke directly from the heart
but why am i talking past tense? he still is like that
only i can't find his phone number...
i'm not even going to venture to describe his lyrics here
so far above and far out of reach, in the topmost layer of the poetic stratosphere
earth shattering and mind blowing are just feeble cliches unable to reflect his magic in words
i wish i could translate some of it... but it's beyond daunting, sorry...
...
i was sitting in the hallway away from everybody else
because i had a nasty annoying cough which interfered with everyone's listening to the music
i remember he was playing night flight when it was still a very new song
and i was staring at the wallpaper, which was all stripey, and thought
bloody hell, this is insane... he is playing the rain! how can a guitar paint the rain so perfectly?
it's impossible, folks, it damn well should be, yet i could hear the rain so clearly
not just a light drizzle, it was a heavy, steady, unrelenting downpour
i never heard anything like that before nor ever again
all versions of this song i find are somehow way below the mark
maybe it's his guitar that's different --- i don't know but something is lost
quite irreversibly