NIGHT TERRORS 

Leaving myself is a way of leaving the world

and my soul is left to guess what is left when I am gone 

in a time of silence, a time of stillness, a space undivided.

If I remain undivided my world must suffer the fate, the folly, the terrible fortune.

The trace of a ghost of a jubilant spirit, the vestige of vitality I once had

lurk in dreams and remembrances and prayers and the in-between spaces.

Within the cave of coarse carnality I’m tormented by vampires of craven yearning.

Cavorting shadows on the wall entrain and entrance beyond measure of my resistance.

They lure me to keep fast watch with a dark eye upon the imprints of past regret

for erotic longing simmers in molten pools awaiting explosive release.

Such release is grief, always a personified figure, a deity of a personal darkness.

The agonized children of night play cat’s cradle with my consciousness,

spurning my wakeful dreams and bullying my inner child into fawning silence.

Wisdom emerges from my body in its own time, in its own way, 

for purposes that exist without explanation or approval,

awakening me to the delirium of eventful darkness that surrounds.

Why do I need to see the darkness, why feel its depth and its claim to my blank attention?

I feel an answer come, for in the dark demons bring me new ideas chasing old impulses.

In the night I learn my feelings are not quite mine. They belong to my dreams, my meaning.

I’m besieged by visitations of shadowy night crawlers,

those compulsive passages that flow within me in toxic streams of sadness,

provoking my soul to manifest glorious nightmares of salvational hope,

for only hope is foolish enough to persist in the face of delayed acceptance,

a fitful surrender to the need to let go of myself, let go of my dreams,

let go of the need to let go. All the while my core being has an energy body

and it uses that body for carnal knowledge of the steaming night,

enabling the incestuous relationship with my invisible world of wishes.

Remorse mixes with lust and forbidden fantasy, layering the mud 

of secrets kept upon the crystalline vessel anchoring the underside

of my wishes and prayers. The ordeal of obsessive desire challenges the need

to believe in visions of relief and wellness, those promised healings of my essence.

Night terrors awaken my wild tempers in emotional union within.

Anxiety sparkles energetic venom, eliminating my resistance to new moods.

Refusal to listen to my night will only swell the trivia of chaotic discontent.

Repetitive details of bother nail me to the moment and bleed me dry.

A persistent wraith won’t leave my sight and a trance of horror befalls me.

I long to ignore no more for I ache to be released from the daylight of my dread.

A stirring in the holy Mooladhara raises intimations of a way forward.

The dark is no longer an impediment, it transforms into the Axis Mundi through which

my soul moves creative purpose up from the root of meaning into the world 

as an ongoing ejaculation into my spirit. My isolation is a climax of intent

destined by my nature to besiege my awareness with joy’s total distortion of me.

There are stars somewhere in my darkness, there are voids somewhere in my stars,

a sea change rises on the tides of a suffering that’s too much for me to bear.

Pain is the excretion of my meaning, sorrow the pus oozing from soars in abandoned ideals.

Convulsing in my catatonia, I breathe into Yin and wrestle my thoughts asleep.

My value emotions awake to something sweet and sacred, a moment lengthening,

an erection of wishful intent, a dream of fantasy realms revisited

where nothing interrupts the full expression of my golden dream,

everything joins with the celebration of innocence found,

the very air I breathe sparks alive with delight, for only through night terror am I

pressed down far enough to give way and allow my ridiculous dream to hold sway.

My dream is my meaning and the absurd realm of night, as terrible as it is,

offers the only way through a failed reality to make possible my unreasonable dream,

it’s the only place where my dream is not shamed or ignored for what it holds true.

My dream attracts a wonderful rearrangement of creative madness in my unconscious,

it brews the strange elixir of hidden volition which when accepted and taken as medicine

calls forth a full glorious expression of my purpose.

What I think I want collides with what I need, as desire ignores them both.

Innocence once again asserts itself as a source of balance and dignity and direction for my energies.

Those energies are boundless but seethe within a body limited by a aging human shell.

I may see but will never be the dream I dream when night terrors force me into my purpose.

I awake tired and regretful that the day has come. I awake an orphan to my world.

I awake to be reminded of what I lost. I awake to feel myself sinking away.

My time passion-wrestling with my dream is gone. I have only nourishing grief for solace.

The prayer of my innocent heart can do nothing else but persist in the hollow left for me. 

That same heart drifts into a day too bright in its unexplained struggle, 

a day searching in vain for fulfillment of the meaning in the dream if not the dream itself.

It’s a day where it’s already too late. Night terrors into day terrors for a soul stuck in twilight.

I am split and I am told my divide cannot be rectified 

if ever I should be whole again. They say the terror and the dream must persist,

each must be resplendent in their own power, and I must somehow embrace

the need and the illusion of both. Until the unlikely day my wholeness is attained,

night terrors into dreams are my only relief from a world misaligned with the Self.

This world is not a place for my dream. I am told my dream is not a place for me.

They say I must fashion a new dream, a dream compatible with this world.

But this I cannot do. For the world will pass. I will go on.

And where I go I will take myself, not the world.

I know I am in the world, no longer of the world.

My dream persists. And therefore, so does the terror.