Peter Hammill Nightman Lyrics

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.