If I should die before I wake

Shocked out of brooding dream
and evil education.
A match is struck, a flare of bright sound.
It brings semiconsciousness,
but illuminates naught but contrived shadows.
They make weasel movements,
peeking obscenely through the blinds of the high up window.
What are they, eh? What are they?
In sudden fear, the tongue cleaves to the palate.
A scrabbling is heard within the false ceiling,
as of excited crabs in legion, far from the sand.
Transmuted, by faithless imagination, into spiders’ horde.
They spill through crevices and knit
a shawl, a caul, a shroud.
A sack of suffocation.
Adrenalin’s injected into a mortified heart.
Too much, it seems. It runs apace,
pursued by a murder of crows
and the blackest of harpies, whipping them on,
but fading. Faded by the day.