Author: Davey Dreamnation (page 140 of 237)

There’s a train that’s stopped moving, in the middle of Hokkaido, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. The sound of a thousand snores, a thousand sleepy sighs. The rumble of a passing train. The one the driver’s waiting for.

There’s a train that’s stopped moving but any minute now it’ll tug at its carriages, jerk into motion, shudder into being. No one wakes up. The girl in the smoking area crouches over the table, asleep, a full ashtray next to her head. Icy wastes.

There’s a train going through a tunnel that never ends and the farther it travels the harder it is to reach, to hear. The lights are all still on but the air in the carriages is full of bubbles. How to remain forever frozen, underwater, beyond the steamed glass, a community of future humans with gills staring at the train.

There’s a train with no passengers waiting at icebound Tappi-Kaitei-eki, cartoon characters on its sides, ice crawling towards its doors. Somewhere a bell rings and cracks the silence but the train remains motionless, misunderstood.

There’s a train running late but no one even seems to care or hear it coming. A flag is raised, a finger pointed, an information display adjusted, blips. Crowds line up to see it pulling into the phantom station. Craning. Breathing.

There’s a train arriving every heartbeat, its contents spilling out onto platforms and into elevators, down escalators and through turnstiles. Twelve hours ago this train was not moving. But I breathed, somehow, through the pitch and dark.

Snow globules hanging from the trees, like silvery pollen or the larvae of worms. Rice fields smothered by six months of snow, their feeder canals obliterated, the shallow stream a black slit in the hollow. Houses dwarfed by their new snow skins, train stations drowning beneath the sky’s white tears. More snow than I have ever seen in my life.

Sea coloured metallic grey and gun barrel blue, heaving and sludge. Water befuddled by the frozen wastes that feed it, concrete storm buttresses the colour of the disappeared sands. Tiny harbours and breakwaters holding several frozen boats. Views across gigantic bays and technical seas, towards mountains of snow coloured like oceans, rising.

Swan so white its feathers are like blasted snow, bobbing in the swell near the storm water outlet. Birds so elegant in the water they are the animal kingdom’s icebergs. Treacherous on land, rearing up to strike the feeding hands. A diorama of peace, just there in the freezing water, a family of swans surrounded by snow birds, seagulls, air.

i was born in a silence car
with only her heartbeat for a drum
no ringing bells or false alarms
i swam through the day’s eclipses

i was born in a silence car
but the sounds infected my tiny ears
& the world gushed into that tiny space
where first i breathed and lived

i was born in a silence car
underneath the surface of where we are
connected to the earth by sonic rays
shuddering like an unlit ghost

i was born in a silence car
it slowly revolves around this star
one day i’ll return to cosmic air
and the radiant clang of oblivion

you never did cross it but still it remains
a pair of spectacles submerged in the river

on one side lies the pleasure district:
neon and ribbons, arc-welded limbs
the scintillation distractors

on the other: some home
or one light that was gutted then torn down
extinguished by passionate hopes

between them, one heartless bridge
a fiction beneath expatriate memories
the mind's dim canals . . .

of course being fake you'll make
a wide circuit round it
beating drums to scare mild geese
before dawn can catch its breath

but grim hesitation tracks you down
makes your heart skip beats

tripping over cracks in streets
sorrows like snow on an iron horse