Me The Monster Poem by Mike Smith

There've been times in my life
Wretched times
In which I caused people
The ones closest to me
Family, friends, loved ones
A great, great deal of pain
Caused them to suffer over my own mindless actions
Through no fault of theirs
They were forced to live through my horrors
The nightmares that were then my existence
Haunted by things they had no control over
Eventually it began to be too much for them
They had tried
Tried earnestly to plead with me
That something had to change
That my path was one of destruction
And that if I was not careful
The consequences I'd face would be insurmountable
Irreparable
And unchangeable
I try to tell myself sometimes that the person doing those things
Bringing on those horrors
That it wasn't me
But I know it to be a lie
Fallacy created to try to protect myself from a pungent and piercing truth
I was that monster
And somewhere in me still
That monster does reside
Waiting for an opportunity to be unleashed once more and reek havoc all over what I've so painstakingly rebuilt for myself as a life
It's terrifying
I am not a weak man
At least I try to convince myself I'm not
But this monster
This invasion of the self
He is all powerful
Omnipotent over my thoughts
My actions
His ever tenacious stranglehold on my mind
When he is present
It is that of the boa to its' prey
Inescapable
The more you struggle
The more fatal the hold becomes
And as he squeezes from me every last drop of myself that I can claim to be the Real me
I begin to embrace him
And the monster and myself become one
Losing sight of the puddle of Smiff on the floor that the invader has juiced and drained into no more than so much meaningless slop
There is no more hideous, more ghastly a revelation
Than to realize that you have lost control of what is supposed to be you in the entirety
And the ones I spoke of before
The friends and the family and loved ones
They are the ones who pay the price
For in my parasitic lunacy I will not realize how detrimental I'm being to everyone and everything around me
I will become the things I've spent a lifetime vehemently trying not to embody
And most dismally of all
I will enjoy it

And eventually as the smoke clears and the dark curtains are drawn
With the monster beginning to recede
And the grip of the constrictor loosening
A void in my chest will remind me daily how very wrong
How incredibly selfish and afflictively noxious I was
And force me to the verge of tears when I recall even the smallest snippets of an episode of the monsterhood that consumed me
And I will mourn deeply and painfully
For the agony I have caused in the people most important
The only people who truly matter at all

I don't know when the onslaught is coming
Only that the odds say it will one day again come
And terrifying as it may be
I will have no choice but to due battle with myself
Not with some outside monster or snake or invader as I've tried to build Him up to be
No visible enemy I can slay and be done with
Because the true evil
He is not any of those things
He is me
And the consequences that he brings on
No
That I bring on
They can never be forgotten
They can never be undone