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Siege of the Waking Mind

Before the twenty-fifth hour dares
to loosen its spectral grip,
I pace the narrow corridors
of my own awareness—
a sentinel unwilling to yield.

The bed becomes a battlefield,
its linens coiled like patient serpents,
whispering of surrender.
Each breath I take
is counted, contested, denied.

Thoughts march in relentless columns:
half-formed regrets,
unfinished sentences,
echoes of conversations
that never truly ended.
They refuse dismissal—
unyielding as iron bells.

The ceiling leans closer, listening.
Shadows stretch their fingers
across the walls,
measuring the slow erosion
of my resolve.

I bargain with the darkness:
one more minute,
one more waking second—
as though consciousness were
a fragile flame
I alone must keep alive.

But the clock does not negotiate.
Its rhythm grows heavier,
a pendulum swinging
through marrow and mind,
blurring the edges of thought.

My vigilance falters.

Words dissolve into murmurs,
murmurs into silence—
and silence into something vast,
something waiting just beneath
the surface of being.

Then—

a quiet collapse.

Not defeat announced,
but stolen—
like breath in winter air.

The guard abandons his post,
the walls fall inward,
and I slip, unresisting now,
into the same dark current
that carries all things
beyond the reach of will.

Nocturnal Journey

In the twenty-fifth hour,
as sleeplessness concedes
to Jungian twilight,
the inviolate ticking
of the bedside clock
betrays consciousness
with sinister rhythm.

It is a requiem of
abandonment, whereby
unprotected souls are
magically ushered to
the threshold of time’s end.

Clock hands melt into
surreal images of groping,
disembodied appendages which
pull me down into the
infernal swirling oblivion.

I seem to fall forever;
plummeting past floating
sandstone ruins, through
prehistoric jungles and
at last into a vast galaxy
of translucent emerald shards.

The heartbeats of innumerable
still-terrified predecessors
urge me to scream before
striking bottom, and I
awaken in a panic: grasping
for the luminous dial
of my unwitting timepiece. 

Resetting the Night

I rise as though expelled—
lungs grasping,
pulse hammering its protest
against unseen depths.

The room returns in fragments:
edges of furniture,
the quiet conspiracy of walls,
the bedside clock once more
innocent in its persistence.

No abyss now—
only the echo of it,
clinging like cobwebs
behind the eyes.

I sit within the wreckage
of that vanished descent,
gathering breath by breath
as though each were scattered glass
to be carefully reclaimed.

No sudden movements.
No wild imaginings.

I name what remains:
a bed,
a body,
a night not yet finished.

The heart, reluctant at first,
begins to loosen its tempo—
from alarm
to caution,
from caution
to something almost calm.

Thoughts, once feral,
are coaxed into quieter shapes:
gentler corridors,
dimly lit and orderly,
where nothing lunges
from the dark.

I smooth the fabric of the moment,
pressing out its creases
with deliberate stillness.

This time,
I will not fall—
but descend.

Not dragged,
but carried.

I close my eyes
as one might step into water,
testing its surface,
accepting its depth.

And somewhere, just beyond fear,
sleep waits again—
not as a captor,
but as a patient guide
with softened hands.

«Grotesque / Falling down the Rabbit Hole», oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm., 2021.

“Grotesque” is an architectural painting, depicting an abandoned villa in ruins. The painting derives its title from the terracotta grotesque on the facade of the building, which is a miniature self-portrait of The Dreamer. Underneath the grotesque of the sleeping dreamer is the inscription «Domus Somnia». This painting is about a nocturnal journey where the dreamer, who has been out walking about, suddenly comes upon an inviting and dilapidated villa — empty and door-less. As in many dreams, the structure is both familiar and not to the dreamer. Here, there is a head-on frontal perspective which is at once both two and three dimensional, and almost cardboard-like, thus accentuating the fragility of this mental architectural construction — which can change or disappear in a fleeting second. Even though the columns and steps at the entrance show signs of a dizzying slight sway forewarning collapse, the Dreamer cannot resist entering through the dark portal — unwitting that he is soon to fall into a bottomless void of Darkness. Should the dreamer allow the building to collapse before entering and rather move on to another dream sequence in this nocturnal journey, or should he play out his role as The Fool and hope that he can wake himself up when necessary?