Aliens in Our Midst

Aliens, asymmetric, brood in the dark crucibles of egg.

In our midst, silicon-based,
Multi-gendered spawn descends from heaven
Far from angel-like, fallen, hell-bent.

Arisen from the cracked stones, possessed and possessing
The unlit streets’ last hours, later in the depth of the night,
Stalking amorphous, lurching in a pentapedal slouch.

Stuff of dreams dreamed behind whispering blinds
Curtains quivering with the breath of sleep
How it leaks out half-shut windows to coil
At the feet of the gutters and cobblestones.

As if the fears of hundred thousand souls
Coagulated in the middle-black night,
Drew a spiral conduit to deepest space
Or in some quantum corridor opened a door
To sentiences hidden in the latency of stars.

Our cosmic terror, our shuddering, sweating
Paranoia laid bare in rumpled sheets,
Clutching bedclothes wrapped suffocating
Round the throat, polyester bonds confining
Arms and legs at wrist and ankle.

On the corner where right-angled light
Finds its darkened edge, cuts like a laser,
Severs sodium orange to nothing
And from the crack, from the ragged time-rip,
Angular and living, livid and undefined
Demi-form shifts like an illusion.

Five-limbed and chimeric, a phantomic figment,
A para-space hallucination, spiking quarks,
Spitting bosons and charmless sub-atoms,
Mutates and mutilates, becomes a meta-corner
Left-angled, imploded, anti-molecular, hemi-solid.

In swathes across flagstone steps and up the wooden hill,
Rattling at the door furniture, crying through the locks,
Like a smoke self-exhaled it fumigates into rooms
Curls like a sinister beard around restless sleep.

Eyes behind flickering cinematic lids,
Frame to frame, zoom and pan the mind-mares.
Alien blood, sublimed and gaseous like air or oxygen,
Slides in on the next indrawn breath
Fuels the senseless images, flames them,
Binds the synapses to themselves, electrifies the brain.

Aliens,  alive in our bloodstream.
Invited by the night
And what most we fear.

© BH, 2016

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I got tired of being serious. Too much thinking, I suppose. So here I let my mind wander off to liminal worlds and the strange beings living there. In the end, of course, our world is as liminal as the next. We are the aliens. Always have been. What we most fear is right there, and in our other-worldly irregular-beating hearts, the door is already open…