The Reflection Pool

I am the ghoul under your bed,  the ogre
in your closet. Yes, that is what I am,
your love turned into your greatest fear,
the one you tucked into unused notebooks
that are stashed under the bed. And
it grows into the behemoth that
follows you around. That’s what
I’ve become.

Because, you see, the things that
we most love turn rancid and plague
our hours, our days, our lives. The love
we fill our bodies with, our minds
contort it into caricatures, whose
fangs, horns, and claws only grow longer.
Spine-chilling as all fears are,

the wild things wait for us around
each corner, tucked into the shadows,
despite their size in our lives.
Grotesquely ballooned and swollen from
the gases that make us what we are,
one step follows the other as we
inch forward, frightened out of our wits.

The monsters did not dissipate in
their immensity as we grew into
the adults we are now. No, in direct
proportion to the depth of our fears,
our monsters have burgeoned, freakish
in their magnitude.

I have been broken hearted
because I have failed.
I have been broken hearted
because I have fully loved and lost.
Neither felt good, but both
fit this life that
I call mine.

And the valley that lays out beside
me is empty of anything visible
as fall begins its silent sneak
into the world, tip-toeing on leaves
that have already fallen, missed,
not once, by any soul. Rot already
setting in. Decay. Bitter.

There is no water to awe over,
its width, its breadth. There’s
hardly a snatch of green in view.
Its passing, is it mourned?
Not this year.
No.
There’s been a dry spell.

But it’s true, what they say about
waiting, if you wait long enough,
something is bound to happen.
It’s just not what I thought it’d
be. There is nothing more than a slight
expansion of every day, the other
side of the not so proverbial mountain.

I fear I’ve lost my ability
to find joy and blessing in
the world around me.

All I see is empty.

Profane, isn’t it?