The Narrow Hall

[Pleh]

A small introduction:

Spoiler: show

The following poem has been a small project of mine for a little while now. I never spent a lot of time trying to fit any particular poetic forms, so it would probably be best to consider this a free form poem. However, virtually every word, phrase, and segment of this poem was rather carefully chosen. This poem is meant to be read aloud as the sounds of the words and their rhythm are meant to produce particular effects just as the words themselves are.

I may in the future record my reading of this poem and link it here, so that you can hear the particular sounds I wanted this poem to make and the way that they were meant to be made.

We walk down the narrow hall.
We do not feel the floor; we do not see it,
But we walk as if we did.
We must walk down that hall.

We turn to look at the wall beside us
And we reach out to touch it.
It crumbles and slithers beneath our touch;
It's moving with us down the hall.

As we move, we feel as if we start to fall,
But we do not leave the hall.
In darkness we can only feel,
The hall is falling with us.

In this way, we walk this hall,
Following steps made long before
By strangers so very near us,
If only ever in this narrow hall.

We hear a noise, a gasp of breath.
From whence? … we cannot know,
But we might suspect a stranger near;
Some uninvited guest.

Whispers caught in wake
And lost in movement,
We slow our pace to turn an ear
And listen... listen closer.

Doubts and fears and chilling questions
Why do we want to walk this hall?
It grips our throat and steals our breath
… Or do we want to walk this hall?

This stranger near, this ghost of fear
Asks again about the hall.
In darkness we can only feel,
Why do we walk this hall?

We stop
And feel a bitter winter breeze
Blowing past us down the hall.
We must walk down this hall.

We stumble back;
Wind hisses against the wall.
We fold our arms
Against the wind... Wind hisses, or wall?

Step back again,
Our right foot falls in ice cold water.
A shiver warm like melting snow
Trickles down our spine.

Another step,
Our other foot plunges to the knee.
The wind is getting stronger,
Rushing violently.

Now further in,
Water reaches at our waist.
We start to sink as it pulls us down
And tries to crush our chest.

Our bones begin to ache,
Our muscles start to tingle.
And now the water finds our throat
So close to swall'wing us whole!

Darkness gone, there's only ice
Which slowly takes us from the hall,
Which falls alone, abandoned now,
Abandoned by us all.

We sink beneath the surface.
Or did we? Something here feels very wrong...
How could it be?! We've been inverted!
We sank above the floor?

We try to swim, to get upright,
But nothing in our frame works right.
We stretch and reach and kick and flail,
All for naught and no avail.

Our nostrils breached,
We cannot feel our hands
Nor toes nor arms nor heel.
We breath it in, our life we yield.

You open your eyes.
Hands and feet awake from sleep,
As water fills your chest
And you learn that it isn't water.

What joy you have! and life as well.
But some stranger dear with concern sincere
Recalls a darkness we can only feel
And how, one day, we must walk down that hall.

---

[Renori Fa]

pleh! just found your poem as I was lurking the library....

I really enjoyed it! karma!

but I also wish you could explain more parts to me, since I feel like I didn't understand the whole poem. but anyway good job!

[Pleh]

Forgot I put this on this site. It might help if you could point out the particular parts which you didn't understand. Or was it the overall theme that escaped you?

[Renori Fa]

I think it may be the overall theme xD

but you write very well. The poem flows nicely and has beautiful meter.

[Pleh]

The idea I had in my head was a near-death experience, walking down the hall away from your body and the world we live in.

One of the primary inspirations for the poem was my idea to play with the reader's head with the plural second person and a mixture of imperative commands and pondering observations. Mostly this was meant to capture a disorienting otherworldliness in which "we" did not necessarily act of our own accord. That was also the power in the change from plural to singular second person. "You open your eyes." A jarring distinction which implies that "we" are no longer together and from here on, all of your experiences are not shared between us.

It also was a bit of an evolutionary poem. I myself wasn't completely sure what it was about as I began writing it. The theme of the Narrow Hall was chosen less for the idea that death is like walking down a confined space and more just an exhibition of how those words and particularly how the SOUNDS of these words affect our minds. In fact, the true poetry to the poem was the choice of words for meter, for partial rhyme, and the highest priority was the ideas and emotions each word gave in acoustic quality and in semantic meaning.

This truly is a poem meant to be read aloud.

The Stranger in the poem is actually several different characters at different times in the story, adding to the topsy-turvy inverted feel I was trying to produce. At one point, he is the uninvited guest who I always pictured in my mind as the person trying to resuscitate the person in the poem. Next, the Stranger is, in a way, the same person, but this time he has taken on the metaphor of the poem, now acting as the ghost of fear, posing the questions the poem inherently presents, but the individual his or herself had never asked themselves. He becomes an arbiter of reason in the face of unjustified demands and a whispering conspiracy theorist playing to the individual's fears. Finally, at the end of the poem, the Stranger takes on the other side, that mysterious other presence never explicitly introduced in the poem which walked with the individual almost coercively down the hall. The inversion of the personality here for the role of the Stranger also adds beautifully to the haunting melody of the poem.

The poem changes right around from a linear hallway to a disorienting jaunt through water and a change of direction when the person decides to stop walking down the hall. At this point, I tried to imagine someone who had been so close to dead their entire body had fallen asleep and what it would feel like to have the blood suddenly start pumping again, bringing the body back to life. One crucial element was the distinct disorientation as the mind is suddenly being bombarded with signals and impulses which it is struggling to organize and make sense of. Then there was a thematic play on dying to live as what felt like water in our lungs turns out to be air given mouth to mouth. It felt like water to a pair of lungs that didn't have the strength to expand or compress through it.

The last refrain in the poem reflects the final thoughts and memory of the survivor as they remember what their mind went through in their near death experience and realize that nothing will be able to prevent their eventual death. One day, they will be in that hall again and they will have to walk down it.