The byline of «Nightmares» is a small puzzle. Turn the letters of "oɥɔʎsd" upside down and they spell "psycho," a joke or a mask worn over a poem that is anything but flippant. Nothing else is supplied about who wrote it or when, so the poem has to speak for itself, and it does so with unusual clarity.
It begins like a lullaby. "Somewhere in the clouds / The moon sang to me / I overheard it / Talking to the stars." The moon sings and the speaker eavesdrops, so she is already an onlooker rather than a participant. The calm doesn't last. "I see" arrives like a cut in a film, and we are in "A house, my house," with "You in the window." That capitalised "You" gives the figure enormous weight, and the look it gives the speaker is "a look of disgust." Then it simply "walk[s] away." The stanza is brief and brutal because nothing is explained. We never learn who You is, and the poem is more claustrophobic for it.
The next move is the cleverest. A line standing alone, "The room shifts," does what dreams do: it changes the rules without warning. The speaker is now at the window, "Looking down at myself." She has stepped into the place where You stood and sees what You saw. The question that follows, "Am I a hypocrite—", is left unfinished by the dash and then repeated, as if she can't stop worrying at it. The pronouns blur here. "That same girl who stood there, in disgust" could be the dreamed version of herself or a ghost of You, and I read that ambiguity as the point. The disgust has passed from the other person into the speaker's own gaze, and she can no longer tell whose judgement she is carrying.
The third stanza turns on a list: a "monster under my bed," "a room full of snakes," "a gun to my head." It moves from childhood fear to something frighteningly adult, and the speaker brushes all of it aside with "I'm not afraid." The poem has set up a hierarchy of terror only to topple it. What "truly scares" her is "Your face / That stupid face you make when you act like you care." After a gun, the word "stupid" is almost comically small, a playground insult. That mismatch is what makes it convincing. The hurt is petty-sounding and enormous at once, and the phrase "act like you care" suggests this person's concern is performed, so that disgust and fake kindness are two faces of the same betrayal. Notice too that the capital "You" has shrunk to lowercase "you" by the time the speaker stands at the window. The figure that loomed in the first half has grown more ordinary even as the hurt it caused has not.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no steady rhyme or metre. Its lines are short and speech-like, closer to someone whispering a dream aloud than to a composed lyric. Punctuation is sparse, with no full stops anywhere, so thoughts spill into each other, and the dash and the closing ellipsis do the work of breath and hesitation. The longest, most contemptuous line, the one about the "stupid face," runs on while the shocked ones stay clipped. Even the sound is quiet: "me" in the opening lines is echoed by "I see," a faint rhyme that links the dreamy beginning to the nightmare it slides into.
The ending is where the poem earns its title. The speaker is "shaking myself, / Telling myself to wake up," which is the standard nightmare remedy. But her own divided voice answers: "But you're already awake..." The trailing dots leave the thought hanging, and the poem stops with the cruelest possible reversal. Waking is no escape because the nightmare is not asleep; it is the life she wakes into. The plural title now fits, since the nightmares are many and the real one is ongoing.
That is why it matters. It uses plain language, a few domestic images, and a very simple structure to show how a painful relationship can be internalised until its disgust sounds like your own thoughts. It is a reminder that the scariest thing in a poem about fear may be the most ordinary: a face, a window, and a voice that won't let you wake up.