Black Hand

Exhausted eyes fight the self-imposed night,
Losing a minute with every seeming second,
Thoughts cease, movements slow,
The off button is pushed; the on button breaks,
A sudden flash of something strange,
A grotesque limb never seen before;
A hand, skinny, black, with white cuts or scabs,
Reaches across the table where I sit, my arms resting,
And picks up a box of cigarettes that did not exist in real time,
Before vanishing, leaving behind a confused pair of eyes;
The hallucination ended as soon as it begun,
Yet it burned itself inside my lids, smoking,
A direct address is dismissed with a disturbing smile,
And a blatant lie,
A world of my own has just showed me signs of a smoke-out,
Now I just want to know where the fire extinguisher is.

(the incident that inspired this poem was bizarre and it happened literally as I describe it - I'd been out the night before and was nearly falling asleep in the seminar the next day when I saw a split second image of a black hand picking up a box of cigarettes, and I have no idea why I would see something like that).