I am the thing lurking below your bed underneath your goody box of condoms, lube, porn and sex toys. What you don’t dare shove into your closet among a sea of skeletons gets secreted beneath the bed, adding to my power and causing you a fitful night’s sleep.
Every night, I seep into your head, your subconscious. You toss, turn, brew with unsettled conflicts emanating from me. My mountainous putrid manifestation denies you sleep.
You suffer my deathblow pummels nightly like a train that’s never late. Your futile efforts to protect yourself, clinging to the bedspread; however, the comforter brings no comfort. It is under my command, and with serpentine motion, slithers around your limbs, impeding your movement. Slipping around your neck, nocturnal noose apnea.
My gang of vicious dust bunnies marks out their territory amid the increasing density of things you hide under the bed. Burrowing through the festering labyrinthine trash heap of unresolved issues, each generation growing less empathetic, more adventurous, exploring additional dark lurking spaces to take cover. Laying in wait for you to forget they’re there and slip your hand unknowingly into their briar patch to retrieve some innocent thing that dropped and rolled under the bed. And fool that you are, you reach for it blindly. Oh, you got a flashlight, but you think you only need it for a power outage. Don’t you know things done in darkness recede before the light? Yet in the dark, long fangs of fear nip at your fingers.
Some of your demons have human faces. They lodge deep into your mind. I spring them free despite your eclectic collection of useless succor ritual: voodoo dolls, amulets, lucky charms, fervent prayers, sacred chants, mind-altering sleep aids. Everything but your most powerful mojo–standing up for yourself.
Until you do, you’re my little bitch. You wish you had insomnia. I’m something worse. I know your secrets. Your vulnerabilities. The things you don’t want said, I say. The things you want to forget, I remind you. I tap dance up and down your last nerve while pushing all your buttons.
Guess what? The cliché is true: you are your own worst enemy. You made me. You are too much of a coward to destroy me.