Backbone Flute (Флейта-позвоночник, Fleita-pozvonochnik) is a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky written in the autumn of 1915 and first published in December of that year in Vzyal (Взял, Took) almanac, heavily censored.

[1][2] The poem deals with the themes of passionate love hurled down to the feet of a woman who still prefers safe haven of domesticity and social status provided by her successful husband, vengeful God's cruelty, death and suicide.

Nevertheless, not only did Lilya respond to this "assault" benevolently, her husband too has got infatuated with Mayakovskty's artistic persona so as to leave his career of a successful lawyer and businessman behind and submerge himself totally both into the poet's publishing affairs and the Futurists movement.

[5][6] Still, as a mere part of a love triangle, Mayakovsky at the early stage of these complicated relationships felt humiliated and vexed by Lilya's unwillingness to give herself to him unreservedly, preferring instead to cling to her well-placed, financially reliable husband.

[6] Backbone Flute was written in the autumn of 1915, soon after Mayakovsky, now unwilling to fight in the War, accepted his new friend Maxim Gorky's help and joined the Petrograd military automobile driving school.

[6] As A Cloud in Trousers several months earlier, Backbone Flute outraged most of the contemporary Russian critics, some of whom referred to the author as a talentless charlatan, spurning "empty words of a malaria sufferer," others as a psychically unstable man "who should be hospitalized immediately.