Night Vision

All that is electric, with a single tick, flickers off.
Everything is lost to dark, and inside this strange
cloud of dust, shadows of varying shades churn
in the night. Petrified, I surrender my logic, though,
I fold my legs up, tight. I cannot be motionless while
my sweet abode, no longer sweet, breaks apart,
separating itself into ogres and monsters.

I stand up to feel the strain, pulling my veins; it
must be a satyr unseen, aiding a devil with
a menacing fork; plus, my make-up case is now
a gory orc, for my dresser-mirror reflects the darkness,
releasing into the room imprisoned forms, ominous:
werewolf, witch, vampire, a corpse, worse yet,
something stretching into a moan of the unknown.

What luck! Now the flashlight has dead batteries...
Must be a trick of the evil faeries. I dash out the door
in my bare feet; something tugs at me, I shriek
and rush, knocking down a plant, that carnivore
Venus’s Flytrap. No more! Good riddance, before
it did away with me, I bet, by throwing dots of dirt,
--poisonous and wicked--on the floor.

Ouch, the street has no glow, the sky
moonless, not even a tiny flash from a star.
I’d settle tonight for any light, at least from a plane.
Something sweeps by me while the night
is wearing all black, and I scream at my neighbor’s
black cat. “Joy, you yelled?
What’re you doing in the dark?”

I breathe with glee... My neighbor, a soul to stay with me.
“Taking in a breath of fresh air. How have you been lately?”
I say with a flair, and add, “The lights are off;
I came out. Do you know what this is about?” “Probably, FPL,"
she says, "Our power company is amusing itself
with night vision.” And I think,That joke was on me,
but to it, I’ll never admit.