Nightmare.

Small little voices

Grumble in the darkness behind your eyelids.

You blinked long enough to dream a night away

But the only sign you slept at all

Is the nest left in your hair by the weaver birds,

Who built the crumbling castles in your mind 

As you lay there.

Neurones tossed and turned in the night

Firing restlessly,

Trying to reconstruct reality from jigsaw

 yesterdays corners and edgeless tomorrows.

The picture makes little sense in this realm 

where colours and caution  are equally fleeting,

when thrown to the wind.

Don't you know shadows disappear at sundown

Only to stalk you in your slumber

As you weep through your sweat glands.

Your eyes twitch in their sockets,

Darting side to side trying to find the villains

Who's misplaced faces seem so familiar,

Like the backs of your hands that pull their strings.

You are equally there and not there.

Puppet and puppet master.

And of all the things that go thump in the night,

Your heart is by far the loudest;

If only you could hear it above your screams

That barely break the surface of reality,

intelligible whimpers for no one to notice.

Your dreambody goes through the motions,

As if you were autotuned to the tune of someone else's pipe.

Smoke escapes your lips as you try  desperately to quell the unseen fires

that only burn on an MRI scan.

Fires ignited from worryseeds planted in daylight,

forgotten in the hustle and bustle of life.

But you cannot outrun your demons in a photograph;

In the still picture of your head on a sweat soaked pillow.

The restful chaos within you.

You flick through channels trying to find a screen in your mind

where your dismembered body pulls itself together.

But the remote stops working 

and no amount of hitting it against your hand 

will bring either one of them back to life.

The screen switches to the black pitted eyes of shadow men

made of static and suspicion.

Your ribs cage your lungs and tighten and squeeze

until it seems life is no longer an option,

And the thought does occur to you that that's just fine but

Instinct is forever the hurdle;

it finds a gram of blood to reanimate your veins,

Your muscles flinch with the force of the fall into reality.

Gasping and panting,

Pupils readjusting to the more placid darkness of your bedroom.

It's okay, you say
to your racing heart,
it was only a nightmare.