for Nastya and Jake

the one turned softly

unto the seam

with a feeling fresh as May

the other journeyed

through the dream

unto the light of day

then come as one

unto the star

their histories fade away

together travel

hand in hand

across temporal

and earthen sands

three days

three days since i felt the waters fall, came far from spleen to hear the call, from here to there against the stream, wish you could feel just what i mean, to dig with hands in barren earth, we scrape until we find rebirth, far too late and too alone, confronted with perceived stone, through eyes that seem as heaven sent, or wills that will not e'er relent, let's drink the deep and giving cup, the healing springs e'er 'turneth up, the lengths to which the soul will go, to put cisterns back tilting up, on smiles and wisps as children would, overcome the dross as we e'er should, in wilderness these things are clear, solutions ring eternal here, it's yours and mine to bleed it true, it's three days since i tasted you...

invasive army nocturne (book excerpt.4)

My train arrived at Stuttgart far too late for me to have called upon Anton.

There were delays...

Cancellations...

Changes.

The Deutsche Bahn is not what it once was.

The hour was late, and I was wasted for fatigue and insipid nostalgia.

I stood outside the Bahnhof and waited for the driver of the next taxi in the line to assert himself.

Finally, he raised his head and noticed me.

He nodded his head and seemingly reluctantly applied the requisite pressure on the gas pedal to urge the black Mercedes forth.

The car stopped and the driver dutifully came to assist me.

"Is it okay if I sit up front?" I asked.

He nodded.

When I lowered myself into the sedan I noticed the Zeitung in which it reported more devastation inflicted by Russian troops in Ukraine, and a counter incursion staged by Ukrainian Forces into the Kursk Oblast...

As well as a Russian language copy of Dostoevsky's Collected Short Works on the dashboard.

"Are you enjoying that?" I asked in Russian rather vaguely.

He regarded me vacuously and said nothing.

Then, after a spell he asked in English, "Where you go?" 

"Schloss Solitude."

He regarded me again, this time with interest.

He drove.

25 minutes later we had successfully concluded our journey through the dark abstraction that had become that night in silence.

We came unto the Schloss.

I laboured to release my long and tired bones from the vehicle.

When I did, he was standing there.

"You like Dostoevsky?" he asked.

"Very much," I said as I paid and thanked him, again in Russian.

"But 'like' is a strong word when it comes to his work. I would say rather that I admire it."

He nodded, shuffled around and back into his auto, and drove off.

I searched my pockets for the right set of keys.

It had begun to rain.

The keys slipped between my fingers.

I remembered another time when keys slipped between my fingers...

That time because of the blood on my hands.

I cursed again and again.

Every moment has its texture...

Its truth, and its place within the paradigm.

I should not have been thinking of myself.

I should have been thinking of my friend...

My friend and Colleague...

Anton...

His despair...

The world...

My own...

despair.

Anton and I had already established rooms in residence at the Schloss Solitude several years earlier...

Shortly after he and his wife had fled Ukraine in 2014.

When Russia had invaded Ukraine...

NOT ANNEXED...

invaded.

The feeling of the advancing night was that of a nocturne.

I found myself muttering the name Chopin aloud.

He understood the language of the night...

And his country throughout history was made to learn all too well the language of invasive forces...

Of occupation.

Schloss Solitude was mainly used as a place in which to write with some modicum of objective perspective...

As well as a place to take refuge.

Two rooms.

One room in which to write and to bleed it out...

The other, a haven at which to sleep.

We kept the place stocked with booze.

I took a bottle of Red Breast and a glass.

I lit three candles in honour of Anton's woman.

I took a first sip...

And somehow was immediately transported back to the war in Bosnia.

I could see spirit self departing from my body...

Twitching and sweating out the whisky...

The worry...

The memories.

I just knew that I needed...

to breathe.

In my dream state I flitted my eyelids in protestation against the kind of intrusive flat light that had always repulsed me.

 

I felt the compulsion to raise a hand to my eyes to scratch and to calm them, but I found that I could move neither my hands nor my arms.

 

All around me I could hear animals breathing… panting… craving. 

 

My heart began to pound and an anxiety that bordered on terror began to constrict my chest. 

 

I could feel the space around me writhing languidly and expressing emptiness from tiny fissures in its fabric. 

 

Inasmuch, as I was not able to raise my hands or my arms, I frantically blinked my eyes in an attempt to better discern the dark, angular shapes that I perceived peering down at me from above.

 

I simply could not breathe, and I began to panic.

I craned my head unto the static, morphic sky, wondering when and why the dark shapes looming above me seemed to be drawing...

nearer.

 

The shapes were other people.

 

I could hear their voices…

 

Their laughter.

 

Proof of their disdain for me and anyone else who might have aspired toward the realisation of an exquisite dream of which I had caught a fleeting glimpse when I had first closed his eyes.

 

No measure of reasonable, bearable light would sustain itself on that landscape.

 

Bitter tears filled my eyes but would not fall.

 

And indeed, the space writhing around me was not space, at all.

 

I was surrounded by bodies.

 

Desperate, freezing, human bodies, each of them dead or dying.

 

Except for me.

 

I was caught somewhere in-between.

 

Now I could smell the decomposition of the dream.

 

The onset of dire reality.

 

Of realism rendered by realists too mired in practicality to allow for any trace of magic in the world to disrupt the cycle of obedience to the rules of humankind.

 

The dark shapes above had come just enough into focus for me to have understood that they were soldiers.

 

They were soldiers on one side of a conflict, when clearly…I and the other bodies around me were on the other side of the...

Conflict...

 

Whatever that conflict was.

 

Whatever ideas or beliefs a person can have to get one’s self shot and tossed into a mass grave in some pale, obscured place.

 

It occurred to me that I could not breathe or move because I had been bound and tightly stitched into a cloth sack.

 

There was no way out.

As if in response to some existential whistle calling me to the fold I began to writhe along with the rest.

 

Soon I was moving in unison with countless bodies that had once been filled with dream and life, but had now become as cold, dead space.

 

They writhed as if in the rendering of a belated complaint against the very nature of the world.

 

I felt the compulsion to close my dreaming eyes forever and to give in to the truth of things… 

 

The reality of the way things…

 

Are…

 

No matter how sickening.

 

“It’s just who we are,” some voice risen on a gasp of sulphur muttered in his head.

 

“It’s just what we are.”

 

And just then…

 

As if I was being called back by something… 

 

Other…

 

Called back from an abstraction in which the dull but persistent intravenous induction of nausea and acceptance scraped like a needle at my epidermis so as to finally penetrate it and reach the marrow…

 

I awoke.

 

revolutions

it's hard to say when truth is blurred

whether we regress or grow

with gradient change as e'er obscured

it depends on what we show

streaming like a thought at night

on the sea, across the sky

stream until there is no blight

cast upon our far-flung eyes

formless fears tear at the veils

the happy scenes we mark

a thrush insists the night prevails

whilst we await the lark

would that we could now away

from that which weighs us down

politics, the world, the fray

affliction morphs with every round

it feels within as if we've grown

from what we were before

the space traversed from vague to known

the other side of doors

once marred and barred to what we would

amend as rifts within reality

the vast expanse at which we stood

ideal and form's duality

as e'er this is as stagnant moving

unto some vapid dissolution

we bleed the hours eternal proving

what's come of one more revolution

around the

sun