thinn’d by exposure to evil airs
the sockets of his eyes are empty
and yet, all through the night he stares
in the dark, we neither of us should see
but his gaze roams visible ‘round my room
his attention drawn plain and palpable
by the candle of his soul burning blue
those eerie lights have also block’d his mouth
which though gaping cannot therefore speak
he wastes the night in uncanny silence
yet a voice in my mind makes me shrink
a droning litany of crimes
atrocities, but mean and shallow
committed somehow by myself against
one pathetic and all unknowing soul
and when at last I surrender my bed
having gained but thirty minutes sleep
I seek a sign from my visitor
why this appointment is the one he keeps
but the only evidence, daily found:
a chair shifted to block my door
bearing a tidy heap of sulf’rous sand
drifted from some far, uncanny shore
And here, the original text:
He stares at me all through the long silence of the night, the tiny candle of his soul burning blue and shining softly out from his eye sockets and gaping mouth. His long ropy hair sometimes falls to obscure those beams, but it’s never quite enough, not for peace, not for rest. He never says anything, not out loud. But I hear a voice in my mind that isn’t my own reciting a monotone litany of petty atrocities committed against, seemingly, one pathetic and all-unknowing soul.
And when I awaken in the morning, having slept for all of thirty-seven minutes, I find only sulfur-scented sand in a tidy heap on the seat of the straight-backed chair that has inevitably been moved in front of the door, facing the foot of the bed.
It is an interesting exercise, the transformation of even a short piece of high-tone literary fiction into poetry – of even such a loose rhyming and metrical scheme as this. Each format carries its own intrinsic rules and imperatives, and yet the storytelling imperative remains the same. It will be even more interesting to, in a few months, when my mind and memory have gained some distance, return to the poem and reverse the process. I wonder if the story will survive the process, or will it too be shifted by the Mobius flip of interpretation? Or has it already been so altered as to be something essentially new?
