Last Light Fading

Night-time of the soul,
they say, comes when a last light
fades in the imagination.

Dreams are no longer a comfort;
these visions behind your eyes
where lurid phantoms dress themselves;
midnight slides toward morning.

Paranoia lives deep inside;
fear pursues you.

So, cower if you must,
beneath your sheets of sweat
or the flimsy cloth covering you
and your embarrassment at being afraid…

…afraid of what, you do not know.

Beyond the doors and windows of your room
a shuttered darkness heaves and whispers
it brings callow weather like a fleeting rain
fumbling down the curtained panes.

Knuckle-white, your tiny fingers clutch
the blanket edges like a deathbed corpse
your fate is an indelible nightmare
invading from the bedroom door.

You struggle to remember what daylight was
having nothing left to measure its light against
as terror mounts you like a steed, bears down,
you smell fear’s dank essence and feel afraid…

…afraid of what you do not know.

©  BH, 2017

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This is poem 1 in a series of 4.  The sequence runs - Last Light Fading, Secrets, Revelation, You Told Us.

I’d read in the run-up to the 2017 General Election about the machinations of big data companies employed by political parties to target voters with dark ads and spin. Facebook and Twitter gather data on us with every click and advertisers use it. (Why else do I see ads pop up for chimney pots after I’ve been researching them to get the right name for a certain type?)

Big data companies can buy or acquire our data and use it to present us with political pitches to suit our profile. They particularly want to read about our concerns, worries and, well fears, the better to prey on them and manipulate our attitudes.

The series follows these demons from where they live inside us, to wherever they are stolen and twisted, even as our own lips speak of them for the clandestine others to hear. 

The images on all four are taken from a visit to a ruined croft house on a hillside near my home. The debris and remnants left inside were like a life abandoned, poignant and tangentially horrific.

The lines in italics, I stole from a friend, Dave Whyte, who used them in a poem of his own back when we were adolescent schoolboys. So long ago.