Nightmares

Nightmares

Undone we are by the night of Time,

The realm of Saturn and his awful sons,

Forever fleeing from thunderbolts

And an unforgiving razor scythe

Wherever we may run and hide,

Unable, unwilling to blink or breathe;

And every breeze is the burning breath

Of a better predator bringing death.

The night is not ours to control,

Those hours of unwilling return

To primordial eons of living

Not as predators but as prey,

The slithering fear still lurking

At the base of our swollen brains

And in all those chilling whispers

That are far too fast to outrun.

In the darkest moments of terror,

Under a boundless starless sky

And a demoniac grinning moon,

The Abyss is singing lullabies

That steal every inkling of sleep,

And evil creatures are skulking

Towards Earth on broken paths

Of fractured, faltering light.

When daylight dies, the memories

Too deep for evolution to touch

Awake and bare their fangs, alive

Again in the shadow of death;

And then, in a neural flash, is gone

The gauzy illusion of supremacy

That we have created just to survive

In the face of unconquerable death.

But not long ago, in the night of Time,

We were the hunkering prey,

And we were the passing indigestion

Of some smarter, faster beast,

And we were the victims of Nature’s disinterest,

And we were the scavenging vermin…

Now haunting our dreams and memories

In this night we can never escape.

Image credit: Christine Matthews, from Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons License.