Nightmare

Nightmare

In bed lying belly flop, fetal, or flat on my back.
Old ghosts and new foes, seep into sleep and attack.
Spells on my sanity, please give it right back.
The fire of these nightmares is a slow burning black.

My sweating head can’t seem to banish,  
Those hellish banshees, that will never vanish.  
For these festering thoughts, I can never account,
Nor for evil demons, that I’ll never surmount.

Drawn in and dragged by the congealing night.
Enclosed by veined wings that seal out the light.
Wresting to restore the holy from the blight,
This forbidden firmament is a punishing plight.

Injected with stark terror penetrating my head,
A helpless mind binds to this nocturnal dread.
Impaled in my skull is a festering fear of death.
Each tale is a noose to choke off my breath.

My frozen bones are pressed in this crypt.
What sadistic part of me has written this script?
From blood, guts and gore there is no eschewing,
The mind constructs the horror and binds to its viewing.  

As these apparitions, flow, ebb and crest,
To find peaceful sleep I can never attest.
Can I tread lightly and still find some rest,
All alone when awakened with ice in my chest.   

Will the jolt of awakening banish the specter,  
Or am I still forsaken by waves of the scepter?
From the clutch of the incubus of this shadowy hell,
Can I pluck from that vortex a new sacred spell?

Now conscious from the clang of The Underworld’s bell,
Waking from the devil’s breath and a terrible smell.
How these apparitions came to be, I’ll never tell.
Befriending these fiends before dreaming is a difficult sell.
                                                              
                                                      Al Bartolis   4/7/2023