NightmaresUndone 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.
