somniat 31

The train finally passes, and we are left
in what should be the dark;
but even though my angel’s wings have folded back in
she still casts a faint pale blue glow,
and I watch as it slowly fades
and the shadows overtake us.

I realize then for the first time
how close we are,
and the icy coolness of my angel melts
into the feeling of her warm body
pressed up against mine,
her head against my chest
as she whispers,
I’m sorry,
I’m so sorry,
but we had to run.

You saved me,
it’s my voice but it’s faraway,
I should have gone to you when you fell,
I should have tried to help you.

Then she does it, and it’s ever so slight,
a breaking of the rules, I’m sure,
the smallest of kisses on my cheek
before she breaks away from me,
so fast — I wonder at once
if it ever really happened,
then she speaks ever so softly,
puffs of warm air on my ear,
you’ll save me yet,
you’ll save us all.

Our nearness ends completely,
as she moves away from me
and I begin to hear her fumbling about in her bag;
the one she’d slung on her back
when we’d left the shop of rocks
and moments later
she is switching on a small penlight;
not as good as the one I dropped,
but it’ll do.

She puts her hand on my face
and pries open my eyes, shining the light in;
it burns and I begin to tear,
then she checks the rest of me, methodically,
I touch my face where she has touched me
and it comes back viscous and red;
you’re bleeding, I tell her,
and I look at her hands covered in scratches,
but it is her torn shirt that catches my attention,
there is a wet shadowy growing splotch
just over the stomach;
she sees where I am looking
and looks there herself for the first time,
she touches the wound beneath and winces,
she stares forward for several seconds
and then begins to tremble,
her eyes water
and she becomes uncertain.

I put my hand on her chin
and lift it so that her large eyes are on mine,
you’re an angel,
I saw your wings,
they were a bright burning blue.

She looks aside thinking,
then back at me,
and then she nods,
okay, okay,
let’s go then, we’ll do this.

I just want to know,
I just know the truth,
we’re not looking for the way out, are we?

She shakes her head.

And I ask it, the question,
where are we going?

She answers,
home.

---

Passages, a poem, follows next. Somniat begins here in the poem, underground.

somniat 30

The world switches on and off;
faulty wires in my brain
crisscross and spark;
this is what the end of time will look like
when the world renews itself
and is born again;
light is all I see
and my soul is sucked into it;
I am pulled forward
and I am sure that this is the color
of redemption,
the sun coming forward to swallow me up
whole
to burn through my sins.

Then time stops.

A crumpled rag doll,
scraped and bleeding on the side of the tracks
stretches out her limbs
and stands awkwardly at first
then with a firming resolution;
she looks at me penitently,
my angel
with eyes wide enough to encompass the world;
I watch as wings spread out behind her,
massive wings, the color of burning sapphire
reflecting stars across everything around us,
all reality has frozen
and there is nothing but her and I
and a train
about to run me over;
she runs at first, then she takes into the air
her entire body a pale blue luminescence;
she is an ethereal creature
and there is no clear border
between where she begins
and where I end;
she sweeps across the distance
and reaches me before the train does,
then swoops me across the tracks
and into a small passage I hadn’t even seen,
her goal all along.

It’s not yet your time,
she gasps.

Then when time starts again
I know
that destiny has cheated fate
and that where we are now
is some place new.

We both turn and watch the train,
as it moves lugubriously forward
over the old and treacherous track;
through its well-lit windows,
we see armed men
in hooded green khaki suits of rubber
with bulbous black goggle eyes
and frighteningly long mechanical snouts;
they will seal off the area,
and there will be no mistakes
except for us, slipping away;
they stare right at us, as they pass
and I wonder how it is
that they do not see her,
my angel,
her wings have folded back in,
but still she glows;
her every breath a gentle, frigid blue mist;
it brushes across my cheek –
and its touch is ice.

---

Home, a poem, follows next. Somniat begins here in the poem, underground.

somniat 29

I’m flying;
I’m feverishly taking to the air;
I resist gravity,
and that sensation in my throat that claws
and that hammer in my head that pounds –
they are no longer a part of me
but objects outside of me
that I study in bewilderment
as I run as fast as
my loose and limp legs will carry me;
for every action
there is always an equal and opposite reaction,
this is my fate
and if I am to redeem myself
then my feet simply must carry me
to where even an angel fears to tread
as she frantically pulls me along
toward a destiny
now inescapable.

Lights flicker around us
and there is a hot dry draft
as we tumble over ancient rusted turnstiles
and dash out onto a crumbling train platform;
I don’t bother asking
why up isn’t the way out,
why moving into the mouth of danger
is better than moving away from it,
I’m too busy flying
and experiencing a rush
I have not had
since back then –
somewhere else,
sitting on that old, worn bench,
my hands inserted into a fume hood
as they mix processed solutions
in gleaming assemblies of blown glass
to the hum of exhaust fans
and the hiss of boiling water;
spontaneously a thought occurs to me,
Melpomene whispers in my ear
as I hit upon it,
the right chemicals in the right proportions,
and then all at once,
I’ve done it,
I hold in my hands
a power great enough
to change the world –
but it wasn’t the world that changed
it was me.

Somniat.

We run down the platform as far it goes
past old graffiti, rubble and ruin,
and then we are there at the end,
where there is no where to go
except down
onto the tracks
and into the subway tunnel itself;
I stop there and I wait,
even as my angel in a frenzied state pulls at me,
strained lines of tension all along her face
as she wails,
there’s no time, Adam,
a train is coming.

A synthetic psychedelic,
an altered thinking process,
synesthesia,
inter-dimensional perception,
an adjusted sense of time;
and all of it
ahead of its time;
properly proportioned –
delirium and delusion,
visions and insanity
boiled down into
a compound easily combined
with bacteria or viruses,
so that with the proper biological agents,
a weapon
of unmatched strategic usability;
the implications were obvious
and the monetary consequences
even more so.

It’s my voice
but it’s far away
and it’s cracking:
It was me,
I killed them,
I killed them all.

My angel shakes her head,
she is crying and frantic,
You’re hurt,
you’ve hit your head,
you don’t know what you are saying,
and a train is coming;
we don’t want to be here when it comes;
there’s a way out –
a way out for you
and way out for me,
please!

My feet feel like lead,
my throat burns,
and my head is throbbing,
but I nod;
in a state of complete numbness,
I let my angel help me down
off the platform and onto the tracks.

Hurry, she rasps;
we run into the tunnel
and I don’t know where the light has gone,
my angel’s little light,
but we run in the pitch black, straight forward,
my angel’s hand all that guides me
from whatever lurks in the thick opaque shadows.

Then it all happens so fast
and yet with such a steady and sure momentum
that I am positive it is predestination,
a moment of time determined
at the beginning of time.

My angel stumbles and falls,
her hand leaves my own
and viscerally I cringe
as I hear her sliding against concrete and gravel
finishing with a thump against a wall;
and all at once, in the distance,
coming from around a curve in the darkness
I see it,
a pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel
moving inexorably toward us
growing bigger by the second;
out the sides of my eyes
I see my angel, off the tracks,
lying crumpled against the wall of the tunnel,
a broken rag doll.

At first, I back away, slowly,
but my heart floats into my mouth
and the fear is so great in me
that I stop completely
and wait
for the approaching sun
to swallow me whole,
to purge me
of my sins.

---

Destiny, a poem, follows next. Somniat begins here in the poem, underground.

somniat 28

There are flowers all along the walls,
blazing flowers of gold that bend and sparkle
whenever our light shines upon them;
they are set amid scenes of pastoral beauty,
splendid trees with soft leaves covered in dew
and clear brooks that flow with nurturing water;
there are even nymphs wreathed and garlanded
in the salubrious air of fathomless space;
and all of it together moves with us as we move;
it’s a delicate work of art crafted carefully
into the wall of the ancient train station;
part sculpture, part painting,
it still holds its potent vibrancy
even after all these years of seclusion
and even under the mere gaze
of a simple flashlight
whose light is slowly fading.

I can feel a breeze,
I tell my angel.

She knows
more than she has revealed
for now she tells me,
we’re almost under the mountain –
it’s intentional,
the breeze is from the caves;
they built this station
and the accompanying tunnels
in just such a way so as to harness the air
and direct it here
through the station.

She turns off her ailing light
and in the pitch-dark we feel it,
the gentle breath of a thousand dryads
scented with my angel’s natural perfume
and the fresh water of deep mountain streams;
she reaches out and takes my other hand
so that in the darkness
we are standing there, face to face,
close enough
so I can feel for the second time today
the warmth of her body
and the coolness of her soul;
she quotes lines from an old poem:
And the soon-to-be lovers
smile on each other, not yet knowing farewell,
and round about them, like a constellation,
their destiny casts
its nightly spell.

For a moment, I almost believe
that our fates are not sealed
but still open to change
and that maybe there is another way;
but even as I near my angel
so close now I could almost kiss her,
the air begins to change,
the breeze becomes erratic
and is laced with an electric
metallic
poisonous taste;
there is a slight quivering in the floor,
and all around us there is a repeated
tinny chinking
as old fluorescent lights begin to flicker on
and shed their pale, but growing glow
over a station that has remained in the dark
for decades.

All around us the walls have decayed,
and in many places fallen in,
the ceiling’s bright azure sky has faded
and the skillfully carved clouds have mostly collapsed;
so that what was once so beautiful
has now given way to old hanging rusted wires,
gooey leaking pipes that drip into bleak black puddles,
and air ducts half broken and layered in thick dust;
in the dark when we had only our flashlight to guide us,
we had seen the only wall untouched by circumstance
and taken it to be the whole,
but now we see the rest of the station
for what it really is,
dilapidation and decay mixed in and folded up
with wreck and ruin, waste and debris.

In the growing light
we both blush at ourselves
standing so close
and with such thoughts;
my angel lets go of me
and lines come across her face,
she is older than I thought;
her deep eyes shift back and forth restlessly
and her shoulders grow tense
with a frightening momentum.

what is it?
I ask,
what’s wrong?

Her eyes are lost;
she is my celestial guide,
but she does not know what to do,
there’s a train coming,
there’s a train coming,
she blinks back disbelief,
there’s a train coming,
she bites her lower lip
and with her massive and pleading eyes
she looks at me directly
with a fervor that frightens me,
can you run?

[Note: The poem quoted above is Rainer Maria Rilke's "Behind the Blameless Trees,"
which you can read in full here.]

---

Fate, a poem, follows next. Somniat begins here in the poem, underground.

somniat 27

She drinks the blood
of those who have gone before her
and her tongue wallows in the wounds
of those life has left behind
as she tastes their defeat
and thrives on it;
she is time
and she is death
and it is ill advised to walk before her
unless an angel has lent you her strength
and guides your every step.

A narrow beam of light
is all that we have in the utter dark
and there is not a sound that can be heard
except our own footsteps that echo across the walls
and slowly die
each time we stop to pause and listen;
oh, and then, what we see when we are still,
in our narrow beam of light.

I’ve heard so much about this stairway,
about the effort to have its artwork painted over,
whitewashed;
the painted walls and steps were an immediate embarrassment
to those who had commissioned the work
and they had literally gagged upon first seeing it;
complaints from the city counsel soon followed
and at minimum they demanded that the edges of each step
be marked in black and yellow stripes;
but deaf ears, big money, and smart attorneys all worked in concert
to preserve what many said was a rare work of exquisite art –
they said, it would be a sin against humanity to have it removed;
so instead of repainting the steps and the accompanying passage walls,
two signs were put up, one in the subway and one in the promenade,
warning those who traversed the stairway
to take care and not fall prey its visual illusions;
yet even with the signs
each year there would be new injuries
and even occasional deaths;
the controversy never really ended,
it just faded away
when the trains stopped coming
and the subway station finally closed.

Where my angel shines her light
we see small circles of darkness;
a series of small floating lopped off heads
strung out like pearls along a necklace,
each with vacant eyes that stare out at us
with an emptiness so solid, it fills us with dread,
a sinking sense of doom;
and over, around them, beyond them,
there are long powerful feminine arms
that stretch out nearly the entire length of the stairway,
each with skin the color of a thundercloud just before it bursts;
and each ending in a wide hand of scarlet,
and each of these in turn clutching a separate and distinct object:
a trident with thick stylized threatening teeth,
a wildly curved falchion fresh from the kill,
a severed head that drips blood down into
a bowl shaped out of a half skull that rests in yet another hand,
– this bowl lets off an eerie colored fire
and when we pass it, I feel sure I can feel its heat;
there is more,
a hand that holds incense I can almost smell
– sweet, cloying, fragrant quietus;
so many arms, so many hands, so many destinies;
and they all converge on a single point.

My heavenly chaperon now shines her light forward
up the lolling tongue
which is what they always called the stairway
because it was painted in such a way
as to give one the visual sense that they were not walking on a stairway at all
but instead upon a smooth, wet, pink plane, that gently curved inward;
and though surely the width never changed
from the top down, people were sure, the surface became tapered and rounded,
while from to bottom up, the effect was just the opposite;
and on either side of the lolling tongue
dripped the depiction of dark crimson streams
that unnerved all onlookers.

As we near the top, we see it,
my angel shines her light upon it,
the famed face of the demon goddess –
so hated in her era and by so many,
yet after all this time
still here, glaring down at those who approach
with eyes that change as you move
so that if you shift just the right way
you’ll see compassion,
but shift a little more, and there’ll be contempt,
love, passion, hurt, anger, lust, scorn
ribaldry, irony, and back to contempt,
a kaleidoscope of feeling,
I try it again and move more slowly,
this time I catch shades of shyness
and ripples of jealousy,
just a taste of euphoria
but a slap of impatience;
no wonder so many slipped on the smooth stairs
as they shifted and wondered
what was it that this goddess really felt;
and then there was and still is
her third eye, up on her forehead,
a vertical slit that stared out empty and void,
unblinking, it followed you,
so wherever you were on the stairway
it was there on you;
its touch, palpable.

Finally, we reach the stairway’s summit
where the lolling tongue drips from its egress,
so that to step into the subway station
is to go through the mouth of the goddess
and be devoured by her.

As we advance on the last steps
what starts in me as a slight shiver
at once becomes an uncontrollable shudder;
I look up at the goddess
and through the darkness I can see her eyes;
she glares down at me
in a preternatural hate;
my world begins to spin
and I fall backwards
in a weightless vertigo;
but my angel has caught me
in the cusp of her arms
and for an instant, I’m sure,
we are hovering over the stairway;
my angel has wings that glow a cold fiery blue,
so bright,
I have to shut my eyes;
and when I open them again
we are safe and on our feet
in the subway station.

You almost fell,
she says lightly, almost laughing,
but I caught you.

---

Run, a poem, follows next. Somniat begins here in the poem, underground.