The Monster Returns (II)

It is too late for me.

The night has buckled and swallowed me up

Along with the winter of a Northern Michigan

While I had meditated on the white treads of my want

written by others before in a path that snaked for miles.

I thought I had given it everything already...

It returned, the monster, six times that night

It wanted more

So it showed its long terrible splintering spears

Its eyes remained black and lifeless

And it wore furs of all wolf-like kinds including my own Shady

At points it was treacherous with leaping purple necks

Or bore the talons of a raccoon trotting like a sheep

These are quite literal

My verse and my voice and my solitude had broken down

It demanded more and I knew not how to give it

And then it came for her - I had already surrendered her

But it wanted to remind me, to vilify any shattered shrapnel of the wound I had left

And once again I gripped her and shook her with my barren desperation

We have been here!

Horrified.

"What's happening to us?" - desperation without question.

Barren.

It screamed... it roared... all the terror and cosmos I knew of

So I raced to the edge of the stairs and to the edge of the cusp and to the edge of its gaping jaws

Open wide, it revealed my dead mother, my dead Shady, my dead--

Awake, I knew.

The Monster is here to stay.