"Nightman" lyrics - PETER HAMMILL

At the dead of night, I woke
With the sense that my dreams were escaping,
All uncannily unspoken
Like words at the tip of a foreign tongue...

As for language, I have none
To express quite what strangeness overwhelms me:
Something's changed and something tells me
To be still in the roar of the distant stars.
The night's full of fire, ice and water;
By day I'll have clay in my hands.

The book is open at a well-thumbed mark
The odds are stacked that I'm facing.
Eyes grown accustomed to light and dark
Can't catch the shadows they're chasing.
Open, my heart, to the vital spark -
A disordered rhythm is racing,
It's a danse macabre I'm tracing.

As the fire feeds the flame,
As the tongue finds expression in its flickering,
Does each breath inform a name
To be dispersed just as soon as it's exhaled?
Was it to myself I came
Or to some other strange and parallel existence?
Will I ever see tomorrow,
To wake and begin it again?

Open, the book at a well-read page,
Hope triumphs over expectation;
Open, the secrets of seer and sage
In awe-inspired anticipation...

Open, my mind in the body's cage,
Unchained in consecration;
Open, my eyes, to the wider stage
The firestorm of liberation -
The night in conflagration.

With a shiver down my spine
I come back to the place where I started;
The sea of consciousness has parted
But stranded is all that I feel for sure.
As nightsight declines into darkness
By day there'll be clay in my hands.
I may feel the clay in my hands.