Karamazov

Smerdyakov threw himself
down the cellar staircase
into a rare darkness,
with some deathwise angel
escaping as white saliva
from his convulsing face.
His was not an embrace
of the bloodied earth,
no hieromonkish love.
There was a mutant bloom
of thought enrooted there
behind his crawling eyes,
something black and silent
beyond the abattoir gates.
In that dark seraphic fall
the blood flower grew.
A nothing was in nothing.
Spittle like ectoplasm flew.
He gave an otherworldly cry
like a night hawk's boom,
the world shivered under it
as at a feathered spirit
passing over in the rain.
Fyodor Pavlovich was woken.
He would not sleep again.