Nightmare

Did you ever feel as if you couldn't breathe?
Your tongue is thick in your mouth, your throat
Is hoarse, your lungs are bursting for air
It seems as if the walls of your room are closing in on you
Crushing you, crowding you, sealing you off from the rest of the world
And then you awake
It's only been a ghastly dream, a terribly vivid nightmare

But with your eyes open and your hands
Trembling and your body bathed in perspiration
You relax
At least you're in your own room safe and it was only a dream
Or was it?

This is a tale that the inmates of Belle Prison still
Whisper in the cell yards and corridors to this day
The story of John Day, a lifer, and his weird nocturnal dreams
It happened long ago, but cell 13 where
It began still enjoys its haunted history
Listen and I'll tell you about John Day and his nightmares

One night at twelve midnight, the stone and steel corridors of Row A
Rang with the hoarse, terrible shouts
Of a man screaming for the guards
The prisoners, so rudely awakened, would normally
Have grumbled and yelled their annoyance
But something in the horrible moans and sobbings
Issuing from cell 13 stilled their tongues

The guards rushed to the cell and swung it open to find
John Day crouched in the corner on the floor by his bed
Now whimpering and crying, his hands to his throat
At the sight of the guards he blurted about his nightmare
"The hands," he babbled, "the hands
Thick, calloused, lumpy hands, they were choking me!"
"Oh, just a nightmare", the guards laughed
But that wasn't the end of it
It was only the beginning of many nights
When Row A would be similarly disturbed

John Day and his nightmare about someone
Strangling him became the talk of Belle Prison
And John Day himself, sentenced to life
Imprisonment, grew steadily thinner and paler

The warden refused to listen to his pleas for another cell
He wouldn't cater to the whims of convicts
The prison doctor insisted that John Day was only shamming because
Other than a loss of weight he was organically and mentally sound
But still the nightmare persisted
And John Day's nocturnal outcries became a familiar sound that
The prisoners accepted as another wriggle of their hard existence

But one night came a new sound
The escape sirens wailed over the yard
John Day had escaped, attacked a guard and gone over the wall
The entire organisation of Belle Prison went into action
Guards with bloodhounds scoured the surrounding countryside
And only two miles away one guard with his dog came on a strange sight
A teamster with his heavy wagon pulled over to one side of the road
And lying on the ground, still in his prison uniform
His eyes bulging unnaturally in his head, lay John Day
He was dead

The guard approached the big teamster
A burly giant, and questioned him
The story was simple enough
John Day had halted him with a gun to make use
Of the wagon and the teamster had fought back
Luckily, John Day's gun had misfired and the man
Had been able to get his hands around his throat

The guard shone his flashlight on the teamster's hands
They were thick, calloused and lumpy
Big, thorny fingers that had strangled the life out of John Day
"Only a nightmare", Belle Prison had thought
"Just a convict's curious dream"
But when John Day's dead body was returned to the prison morgue
The story of cell 13 became the terrible tale that it is to this day

And what of your dreams and your nightmares?
If you ever imagine that fingers are at your throat throttling you
Don't twist and turn
Wake up, open your eyes
Maybe it's just a dream but someone could be killing you