It’s only an Incubus

Serpent breath
of beer and wine,
slithered down,
my neck and spine.

I’d given consent
for its tentacles to coil
round the edges of my heart.
Not knowing that embrace would smother,
away the innocence of my psyche.
Yet this creature was no Eros.
The furtive assaults were like discarded dreams-
nightmares with a pulse
that I wanted to put in arrest,
but its consistent strikes in the night
resuscitated that same image,
forcing me to acknowledge its existence.
Like a wound,
that won’t stop stinging,
won’t cease bleeding.

Just hemorrhaging out
over all that I see,
staining the stones
of my mazed memory.

The vastness of my skin was torn
by sandpaper hands.
Scars etched into obscurity,
over the preexisting
white threads I had sown.
I steamed my vitality
because I was
anesthetic in wake of this assault.
I Let its frigid grasp
sink in long before it had
haunted my unconsciousness.
Little rivers flowed
from my soul every time,
rapid and screaming,
as they were strangled
by the white fluffy mountains of my bed.

I couldn’t turn off that faucet effect
from its fingers like venom-tipped spears,
that worm into my core,
and flood out those tears.

But then they evaporate,
taking all sensation to dissipate,
into the labyrinth.
Those walls are branded
by the acidic touch
of this drunken beast.
I fortify my own skin to stone,
only to be dilapidated
by the very shade of its presence.
Weighing ten times my own weight,
casting fissures in my defenses
that disregarded visions seep their way through in the end,
with the poisonous words
of this ignorant terror.

Oblivious and blind,
a toxicant clouded soul,
and yet it stands there idle,
leering in complete control.