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.
Ever the pull of opposites, ever the quest of resolve… this a fate, this a destiny shared…
I wonder about these things … it is a quest.
This was such great cinematography as usual, but I got lost a little bit. Forgive me. You are flying and yet you need your feet to carry you. You are Somniat, yet you are Adam. The only conclusion is that I’m daft, but I got lost here…like I got lost in the TV series LOST and the TV series…uh, well…I can’t remember. I got lost is all I know, and usually I can’t catch up. I really am a very simply girl. But the word crafting is excellent as always Matt!
Annie,
I really appreciate your comments, because it’s helpful to know where people are losing the narrative. Almost surly once I finish this, I’m going to reedit a little and put it out as an ebook on this site — for those with an interest. So if people point out places where they start to lose the narrative, I’ll remember that when I edit the whole.
If you merely read each entry and can find enjoyment in just the expression of words, I’m very pleased. I really appreciate you reading Somniat — and in your comments you almost always unerringly pick up on the emotional resonance of each scene.
I don’t want be a huge windbag here, and I want the story to stand on its own, but at the risk of boring you to complete and utter tears, I’ll explain a few things here …
The whole idea for this story came to me as a dream I had last July. I wrote the dream down in about an hour or so, early in the morning. Then in August put together a story that followed closely from the dream — then my wife left to take the kids to her parents for a few days, leaving me alone in the house — and I thought, wow, I can type up this whole story in a few days and I’ll be done. I stayed up really late that first night working on it — literally feeling feverish. And as fate would have it, I woke up the next morning with the flu. I was down and out until my wife came back home. So I shelved the whole story until September.
I still thought, okay, this story should just write itself — but for each scene so far it has gotten progressively harder for me to take what’s in my imagination and to get it into words. We’re almost 2/3 through the story at this point — and I really wish I could have delivered each scene on a more timely basis — because I think that would have made things clearer and easier to follow.
I’m writing this story in such a way that if I succeed there won’t be any one definite interpretation of the story — however, there will be some fairly good interpretations. I don’t want to lose anyone to the point where they just throw up their hands and say — I can’t make any sense of this. If that happens, then I’ll just have to chalk that up to experience for when I start another similar project. It’ll mean I failed, but hopefully it will be a failure I can learn from.
But because I want there to be more than one interpretation, I’m hesitant to explain anything. But clearly, if you came across with the idea that *somiat* is the name of the narrator, I’ve thrown you off course. I’ve adjusted the punctuation a little so maybe it’s clearer now, but Somniat is not the name of the narrator.
In this scene, which is really important to the whole story, the narrator is going back and forth between describing something *inside* his head and describing what’s going on externally.
He feels like he is floating along, flying, but he’s not — he’s running. At least, I intended to convey that at the beginning.
Starting with the words “somewhere else … ” he starts reminiscing — memories he’d apparently forgotten are coming back to him — at the end of this he whispers to himself *somniat*. He’s not speaking his name. He’s verbalizing what he just remembered. Somniat is in reference to what he discovered. The narrator discovered somniat.
You might then ask, well, what’s that then? What is somniat?… well the narrator starts reminiscing again in the verse that begins, “A synthetic psychedelic, an altered thinking process, synesthesia …” That entire verse offers the best clues as to what somniat is.
Another clue is that in earlier scenes you had soldiers moving around in hazmat suits — trying to take control of this entire underground area. Why would they need hazmat suits?
I have to admit, I hadn’t even intended on introducing the word somniat into the actual story until almost the very end, but it just popped out into this scene, so I left it there.
I do anticipate some key scenes where even more clues are offered as to what is going on here. I do want there to be a plausible explanation for what was going on the entire time — I just don’t want that to be the only explanation. I’m trying to leave room for the reader to have some control over the story.
many pleasant wishes,
Matt
Ahhhh. I appreciate the explanation. I considered that somniat was more an experiential word than a name, but I always assumed it was the main character. I think I am reading these now just for the pleasure of your word smithing and the imagery. I have skipped some, due to the chaos of my life, and misunderstood some. When time allows and you’ve placed them back to back in an e-book, I will no doubt follow along without problem. Write true to how you want the story to present and the wide birth you wish to give it!
WOW! I’m so happy that I read this verse of yours. Honestly I love long posts, they help me to connect better. I was reading and felt like looking some movie. The colours, textures in words and all the characters where so clearly visible. I could absolutely connect to each and every word. Ones I was done with the prose, i read your comment above and learnt that it was some dream you saw sometime back, and so beautifully woven in words. I’m truly overwhelmed and so touched with this prose and your personal touch to the whole emotion. Ones I’m done with this comment I shall red it again….Between my fav. para was “Hurry she rasps and My angel stumbled….” Loved it!!! Please keep writing more…you are simply awesome!!!!
Rachana,
Your comment is really awesome … thank you so much for taking the time out to write it. I really appreciate everything you said!
It’s great to see the overview here. This piece definitely has some great imagery within it, and captures a tension between the knowledge of science and the knowledge of inner worlds, of faiths and spirits. There’s some great action and sense of motion that carries a sense of pace, a sense of transformation and urgency, and that’s important for a piece like this. It will be interesting to see where later pieces go. Keep writing
Thank you, Bryan!
Awesome!! This brought to mind Stanislaw Lem’s wonderful science-fiction parable, Altruizine. I recommend it….
Thanks for continuing this excellent read, Matt! There are few enough things that are really fun around, and i am glad you are contributing one more.
Thank you, Peter! I will definitely check out Altruizine!
Thanks for the bit of explanation above, since I am stepping into this narrative rather late in the game. I was assuming Somniat meant ‘dream poem’ from the root somnial, or of dreams, and each fragment was a piece of dream, but in this particular –episode? verse?–it becomes clear there is a whole dystopian society sort of element, some mad science, and the angel (I read part II, also, much more a straightforward action sequence) is really becoming psyche for me, indivisible from the narrator, though he has distanced her in form…I am so bad at concentrating reading online for long periods, so forgive me for not pursuing this more regularly, but I frankly find the whole project fascinating–I would love to read it in paper form, holding it in my hands…but its much easier to find wonderful stuff like this online than in a paper format any more. Thanks for putting this work out here to delight and allure and mystify–all good things to be experiencing, and all fine poetry.
Thank you for your really thoughtful comments, Hedgewitch. Just a couple of responses …
I was assuming Somniat meant ‘dream poem’ from the root somnial, or of dreams, and each fragment was a piece of dream, but in this particular –episode?
Thank you for catching that! Yeah, I was playing around with the word dream. The story is based on a dream … the narrator’s experience is dream-like. I was also trying to keep each entry such that I hoped it could be read individually and enjoyed … and then somniat does have its own separate meaning in the context of the story.
and the angel (I read part II, also, much more a straightforward action sequence) is really becoming psyche for me, indivisible from the narrator, though he has distanced her in form
I think reality can be ambiguous — and I’m trying to convey that in this story. I definitely don’t see myself as at some point saying — and that was all a dream — or even specifically, “and she turned out to be all a dream.”
I guess I see each of our individual viewpoints as an interplay between our own projections onto reality and the feedback reality is giving us — there’s this interplay. So in this sense, everything the character is experiencing is very real — it’s not *just* a projection. Depending on the size, shape, color, focus and so on of our own individual spotlights — each of us will see something different when we shine it out there at reality. But what we see isn’t determined *only* by the spotlight.
So in that sense, everything in this story is very real. If when the story is finished that hasn’t been conveyed clearly enough, I’ll have to think about it how I could have done this better.
So it’s not my intention to convey the angel as merely being a figment of the narrator’s imagination. There’s is a strong element of reality here as well. At least I want to convey that … not sure if I’m succeeding or not.
Writing this whole story is a real learning experience for me.
Thanks again for your neat comments.
I read back down through your latest posts to this one, Matt, and I think you are just excelling here with an involvement and immersion–I normally could never read that much online with my hideously short attention span, but I found myself reading backwards passage by passage because I just had to know, and each one leads seamlessly into the next, yet has its own message–the butterflies trying to pull out her soul…genius. And the terror of claustrophobia, of the rock coffin, the terror of the journey itself–the psychedelic-flavored flashback when the two figures join–just amazing writing. The line that got me was ‘tell me what color my wings are again?’ *sigh*
AFA as your comments above–I definitely don’t feel that the events in the poem feel unreal at all–surreal, perhaps, but they have immediacy and physical detail in too high a degree to be delirium–it’s a sci-fi, blasted heath, gothica kind of real, perhaps, riddled with a dream state, but I didn’t mean to make you think I saw the angel as a figment–as something unreal–there’s nothing more real than the anima, the woman within the male mind and vice versa–though that may not be where you’re going either, but I definitely see her as a living part of the narrator, even if only through the joining power of love and sacrifice.
This is a fine work of art you’re producing here, Matt. My very sincere appreciation–it’s a pleasure to read it.
Hedgewitch,
Thank you! There is, indeed, something going on here with the narrator’s perception of his angel — and I am very appreciative your ability to pick up on this, a lot of this is done intuitively on my part, so I haven’t really fully analyzed everything — and won’t until I’ve completed the work.
But I think there is a lot of merit to what you are saying, you might even be spot on, even more so than you realize.