If you have never awoken late in the night
to a soul-crushing feeling you could not identify
To the hammering hooves of a racehorse heart
With a jump and a gasp and a fright and a start

If you have never felt a pillow of darkness upon your face
As you drift off to a silent place
Squeezing out every single breath
Playing hide-and-seek with death

Thrashing in your bed, reliving what's been said
Clutching to your head
In fear of an impending explosion
if you have never felt the erosion of time
or the way beauty becomes grime
to be wiped away on a windscreen
and if you have never seen

the pits of darkness pooling at your feet
and fully given yourself to defeat
if you have never laid down to close your eyes
certain that you would never rise again
then

You have never known the terror, the fear
Which bears down upon myself year by year
And never would you hear, with ears this pure
the screaming  of the demons which trap us here.