Grave Bed
The room is a casket of suffocating velvet,
And I am the corpse sewn inside the lining.
A presence, a gargoyle of shadow and bile,
Is inhaling my breath, a thief slowly mining.
I scream for the dawn, but my throat is a desert,
My eyelids are bolted with lead and with rust.
The air in the room is a curdled, grey vapor,
And every heartbeat is grinding to dust.
The hunter is closer, a cold, crushing tether,
My pulse is a drumbeat that falters and slows.
My lungs are starved bellows, struggling together,
To capture the air that the darkness bestows.
I am hunted by silence, by pressure, by dread,
With nowhere to run in this cage of my skin.
The heartbeat of terror is dying, near dead,
As the walls of my body cave helplessly in.
For hours I am drowning in oceans of static,
A marathon runner in shackles of chain.
I am swinging at smoke, I am tearing at specters,
While needles of terror are suturing my brain.
The beast is a fever, a hunger, a mirror,
It mirrors my pulse with a cold, hollow beat.
I am running through labyrinths built of my panic,
On legs made of water, on leaden-hewn feet.
Then, the final eruption—a blade through the silence—
I shatter the tomb and I vault from the bed.
The gasp that I swallow is sharp as a shrapnel,
I wake in the dark, truly convinced I am dead.
My skin is a map of the sweat and the terror,
The room is a stranger, a cold, empty cell.
I lie in the silence, a soul newly haunted,
The ghost who survived his own private hell.
The terror subsides, or so I believe,
As I tear through the veil that the shadows had spun.
But the mattress is hungry, it refuses to leave,
It drags me back down ere the waking is done.
The fabric is liquifying, turning to maw,
I am swallowed by cotton, by coil, and by thread.
I am pulled to the center, by invisible claw,
Consumed by the sheets—now the grave of my bed.
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