Attention, the doors are closing.
Announcement on the Moscow Metro
The metro map floats through the deep sea trenches of my mind, neon amoeba.
Every station is another opening and closing of doors, grim grand babble in our heads.
Faces, nameless faces, I need your foreignness to stimulate me, to lead me astray, to tantalize and torment.
My dreams are no grander than the next man’s, but I hold them oh-so dear. Everything continues without me: it is all Out There and I In Here.
Versed in courtesies of fear, I court the stillness, the stillness in the rush. Passions play blind-man’s-buff down here. Soft slow oneiric gloom beats my pulse down into trance. I am the fat priest adoring icons in the dark glass, fashioning the moment’s liturgy, with these shaman’s words about me like an ermine stole round a ballerina’s neck. Eyes coincide and glance away, cat’s cradles of intimate strangeness.
And is it true that when slaves are offered their freedom, some refuse in dread?
The quickening chaos, the pullulating mass, the protoplasm…swerve and dodge, defend your territory, hurry, hurry…and then the escalators’ stately purgatorial glide, and the faces jousting up and across, and the faces jousting down and across, licensed to stare, to wonder, to seek…each face for a second or two, no more, then gone, gone, and the sad trance surfs its own wave.
There, in the tunnel, stands a girl with her notice: Please help, my mother is dying. Beside her, another: Diplomas for sale.
