In Twilight

In twilight all perspectives change.

Trees seem taller, bulkier;
Hunchback beasts
Ready to stalk the night.

And the clouds, mere water-carriers by day,
Project the dreams and nightmares of the sleeping earth in
Curdled shadows on the curving dome of night.

I had forgotten quite
How small I am.

Darkness rises like a tide,
Welling from the shadowed depths beneath the trees and
Running out to lap around my heels

I had forgotten how it feels
To be so out of place.
And alien beneath
A rising moon.

There was once a first time,
A first awareness of the world
Outside my constructs,
A world where I didn't really matter.
May there never be a last time.

Only in alienation is a
Sense of self maintained.
Only in being utterly irrelevant to others
Is the strangeness of ownership of self brought home.


(c) A Mc N