Brewed Fear

In this poem you find me standing alone in the darkness of night. Standing in this same place while the sun is up would have been of little or no consequence. Somehow darkness triggers the element of fear in Me. I become afraid and my imagination begins to play tricks on me. When the bewitching hour of midnight arrives I begin to imagine that I see weird and horrible specters made by the nights shadows cast by the wind swept branches of the trees that encircle me. In frenzy and close to madness my mind begins to hallucinate. In a trancelike state my mind thinks it sees three large ghosts. The ghosts are symbols of Mans three greatest fears: The fear of poverty, The fear of getting old and the fear of dying. The most destructive of the three (poverty) steps forward. And in a loud voice speaks. She states that all my fears are two-fold. First, I fear the inevitability of old age and death and the probability of poverty. That these fears are by my own hand because I cling to ancestral fears that were and still are a mixture of ignorance and religious fantasies and the cause of all my dread. Standing in the silence of the night when Heavenly sights disappear from my view I found myself lonely and afraid. Then As midnight approached the shadows turned to Horrid, winged specters leaping about me. I was mesmerized by their ghastliness. Suddenly there appeared from their midst three Giant ghosts standing before me possessed. The largest of the three stepped forward. She Began to speak in a thunderous voice. "Your fear is two-fold: You fear what you see, Us! At the same time your fears are by choice. You cling to ancestral fears concocted In ignorance, steeped in religious dread."