Train Noise

Holding my head in the mists of twilight I feel the walls of masonry rise up around me, cold, gray and wet with the fog. And there are lights overhead, the fearsome lights of a million dead worlds all converging like ancient space faring vessels, all converging overhead and shining down beams of blue-white luminescence that run across my face like sun rays. I bleed from my ankles and wrists. There are words built into the blood, drunken words that spill out in drunken rambles, and I curse them, I curse the rambling, I curse the words tumbling from my wounds. There is the sound of freight trains in the back ground, a horrid whistle that signals the great motion of the bulky machine. It moves closer and the ground under me shakes. The walls rise up around me, sheltering me from the sound, from the movement of the train. The world gives way under me, and I drop, as if into a great shaft in the earth. And in that chasm all the faceless members of the human race stumble in the darkness, their chalk white skin crackling with blue lines, with throbbing blue lines of fear and worry, and I am afraid of them. High above, the spacecraft still hover and the train still runs, an infinite extension of rolling steel off into the abyss of an endless horizon. I can still feel its motion down in this pit, down in this pit of faceless men, and I hold my breath and I see them change in the pulsing lights coming down from above. They melt, their white skin sloughs off from their frames as the train whistle blows. And the melting, faceless men line up in front of me, orderly, in rows of fours, and they link their melting arms as the slowly boil into bleached skeletons with grinning death's head skulls. Beneath the faceless, taut white skin, is a face of cavities and teeth, a skull face unseen through the white flesh now melting from the men in the elevator shaft. In their ruled lines of fours, the men, now a chorus of skeletal wraiths, all solemnly dance in unison. Their is a xylophone quality to their steps, an echoing steel sound that mixes with the train noise so far above us and creates a symphony of the empty industries. The skeleton men dance so solemnly that it whispers away and sense of joy in the movement. In their teeth, tiny diamonds shine, and in their eyes, diamond pupils sit so deep that they are only visible in brief reflective moments as the lights from above shine down. And the rows of four surround me in my cavernous tomb, still in eerie time with the train noise above us. It seems endless. The lights are hypnotic. The walls begin to turn to dry plaster and the cracks echo the drunken sounds from my wrists and ankles. Further below, there is an old library, a library of dusty periodicals and sepia toned funny books. I will find those librarians and I will make them read every word they've curated. I will not stand for anything less.