Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     No matter how many times your neighbour greets you courteously, you never really know what’s going on in his skull or his flat. Both are ciphers: the door just shut, the head just turned away, now showing god knows what expression of disgust, exhaustion, desire, or merely indifference. She could be having wild jungle parties for deaf people, he could be cutting up the bodies of young girls. Walk through this door and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a fiscal crisis in Narnia, that one and King Arthur’s Court is having its Connecticut session.

     I had a dream last night that K. was abducted by one if the neighbours to be the sacrificial victim in some occult rite and there was nothing I could do about it. The ceremony was to take place in his apartment and that’s where he was holding her. The police wanted proof before they charged in, and proof was what I couldn’t provide. I simply knew that she was in there and that at any moment that crazy bastard might draw a knife across her throat and I’d be standing outside in the corridor staring dumbly at his door. The police told me how sympathetic they were and that “people come in every day with the same story and we find the corpses a week later”, but then went on to explain carefully how one had to wait three months for written permission from the appropriate offices before anything could be done. I sighed and went back to staring at the door. True, he was restricting his bizarre behavioural practices to the privacy of his own apartment, but he had taken K. out the privacy of ours and into his. Such overlapping of privacies, I brooded, destroyed the whole point of the thing. My father flew in from B— to console me during my time of crisis, and the two of us stayed there waiting in the corridor, looking at the door. Occasionally, the neighbour would come out or go in to the apartment and in the short moment when the door was open, we would try to see over his shoulder, but all was blackness; nothing could be made out.

     After a while the usual dream metamorphoses occurred - my father turned into Marek Strnad, the apartment building became the library of Tlön - and the crisis faded. I forgot about K.’s danger for the rest of the night, but woke up with the suspicion that our neighbour had conjured up both Strnad and the library to distract me from the horrible ceremony about to occur behind his door; and the suspicion that the meaning of his name in Z— was a combination of “magus” and “blade”; and the suspicion that if I went to look for my Z—-English dictionary I would find that it had disappeared along with K. the evening before.