Monsters

Free-written very brief slam poem

Monsters

By Leighanne Colfield

 

I have a monster inside me. A black, fuzzy, disgruntled monster inside me. It doesn’t speak, nor does it move. It just sits there in the bowels of my being and haunts me.

 

I think everyone has this monster somewhere inside him or her. For me, it’s in my soul; it’s in the very fabric that makes me who I am. It is in fact, a part of me…no, it is me. I am it.

 

This monster is scary. It’s not the cookie monster, nor is it in the likes of an imaginary friend. It’s a being that encapsulates who I used to be. My inner core, my wildish nights and devilish temper. It is my screaming fits of greed. My deliciously sinful desires to hate myself. It is the monster that resides in my soul.

 

 

 

I see this monster everywhere I go. It’s in my friend’s face after she broke up with her boyfriend.  It’s in my Aunt’s careless acts of greed and revenge, it’s in my mom’s tears. It’s in every single lifeless face I see walking about campus aimlessly with no intention of a future.

 

It’s in the face of the dying. The face of the regretful. The face of a prisoner.

 

It’s in me.

 

Did I cause it to appear on the face of my friend? My mom? My peers?

 

No. It resides in us all as a fiber of everyone and anyone the Earth has ever borne.

 

 

My monster likes to eat at me sometimes. Everyday is a struggle to keep it fed and tame. I’m sure it’s that way for other people too. I have seen a dark, macabre, morbid, hellish place that I took myself to out of pity and fear and jealously. Supreme jealously. I was riddled with green morbidity. Perhaps then my monster is green and not black?

I like to think of my monster as a pet. A very bad, naughty, pet that pees on furniture and eats my homework out of spite. It lashes out in public, bites people’s thumbs who try to pet it, and barks incessantly at neighbors.

 

One time I let this monster out. It went rampant and destroyed many hearts and broke down many doors. I had to fashion a cage for it.

 

This cage, made of tightly wound strength and determination, kept it subdued for a while.

 

But it eventually found a crack and it ate at me a little bit more.

 

So I reinforced the crack with acceptance. That seemed to do the trick. But when it glared at me from the inside, I knew I had to recognize it and plaster it with a taste of its own medicine. Not quite pride. But assurance.

 

I put a post-it on its cage saying “I live here”. Very simple. Very brief. Very concise. It heeded.

 

My monster and I are cordial now. It still makes caustic remarks. It still haunts my dreams and plays the devils advocate at night. It makes me stir and twist and sweat in my sheets. But I never take that post-it off. I live here. Not my monster.