Night Terrors Poem by Mark Heathcote

Night terrors were once the bane of sleep.
Leading to tears and a piercing shriek
One night, woken by a lightning storm
The curtains were to move and transform.
Imagine my fear as it opened.
And then in walks hell's chief exponent.
Moving slowly, with no urgency
It appears like a malignancy.

A dark, cancerous growth before me
A sense of the gothic, the ennui
yielding of Dorian Grey pleading
for forgiveness—sins yet preceding
Imagine a vast future canvas.
Draped before your eyes' chasms
And then the door is flung open wide.
And your mother comes shouting to chide

But then, with a look of shock horror
She is taken aback and calmer.
But its cold dagger has made its mark.
Its eyes are like marbled jasper.
Has switched on its evil dark cancer
You're a ghostly white alabaster.
Realising tomorrow daytime
All will now be truly crystalline.

That these are no longer night terrors
But trials facing triumphs and errors
Elusions and chains, dreams and drugstore
Remedies without hope or recourse
That these shadows hold your darker side
You deplore but yet glorified
And will revel in a future time
Like a cyclone dust swirling repine.

Notes of sin and trouble amber burning
Good and evil wars overturning.