Midnight Memory

I sit up in bed,

The midnight hour come and gone.

Eyes burning,

As they should in a sand storm.

The mind races,

Inebriated in a myriad ways;

Rest is impossible,

The night burns away like an infinite candle.

The dying of the light has begun,

Not to end before the rays of the bigger light accost the world.

What is it that torments me, thus?

Pain, sorrow, fear, doubt?

So think not, do I.

But, wait; is this a lie? A solitary soldier guarding my universe of deception?

No, no, no;

With a flustered restlessness,

I am sure it is nothing of such extremity.

What, then?

Till the walls feel like the naked whores I’ve fucked,

Invisible and blank,

Do I stare;

Not at their bare exterior,

But beyond them – to my interior; as blotched, as the wall was blank.

Grappling with the beings in the depths of my soul,

A certain realisation begins to knock

Upon my mental door.

Through the peephole I see;

Who is it?

I look, but deny; ‘tis the answer,

But not for I.

‘T cannot be; bereft of sense,

Devoid of reason, defying all worldly logic.

Away from the door;

I dare not open.

If it be true,

I wonder if I still be human.

The question, now, pounds my head -

What is it that torments the night, thus?

Fearful of what is to be found,

Down my neural pathways,

I gaze.

Out of the darkness,

There materialises a many limbed monster.

Grotesque at sight,

Heart wrenching when felt,

Impossible when thought.

The shape of a myriad lives lived in the past approaches me;

Lumbering like a ghost lost in the endless abyss of time.

All the identities I have adorned

Stare me in the eye;

Daunting, haunting - leaving me dead, bringing the future to life.