Bright heat shelters me,
Absorbing doubt into a glowing orb.
A cocoon,
wrapping me up in silky denial
And
offering the freedom to pretend.

Crisp air weaves it’s way between my bones,
Shedding burs
into every notch.
The prickle in my neck taps Morse into the skull,
The truth that looms like Babadook:
     
      The excavator of ideas
       is a soulless body
       that only dreams
      of digging the earth.

Suspended in-security,
turning thoughts to stone.
The chisel makes its mark

My hands are tied, the artist is fear.

If we make our monsters live all by themselves,
they'll find a way to be under our skin again.

After all our monsters
are all ours to feed.

I woke up in the middle of night, last night, to an unfamiliar noise. It was a vibrating frequency coming from the floor underneath of me. I live in the third floor unit of my building which means there's second and first floor units. The noise is coming from the people underneath of me, probably. I heard it again and I was unsure of the location. Then I heard it a third time and this time it sounded like it was coming from my front door. I heard the **** make a noise. The sound of someone turning your locked doorknob or vending touching it in the middle of the night is not okay. I felt the adrenaline rush to all the muscles in my body and for a moment I was ready. I was still. I listened. My instinctual fighting abilities have evolved to this moment even though I have never been in a physical fight with anything except my boyfriends dog... After so many minutes, I began thinking about that very specific door **** noise and then trying to figure out what that vibrating rumble was. In my head I compared it to the Babadook which is a movie I had just watched recently. Even though still terrified hiding under the blankets, I found this moment comical. This would be the moment as a child when I would run into my parents bedroom night after night telling them about my nightmare and then continue sleeping in between them. In this moment I decided to let my mind wonder and listen for the first time in a long time. Through meditation I have learned to shut the unproductive doors in my mind. As I listened all I heard was the rushing vehicles on rt 76 across the river. The sounds created it's own river. I heard the breaks of the tracker trailers rumbling down the freeway to fade into the noise of the night.  I heard nothing. I heard a car drive by on my street. It hit a *** whole. For awhile the noises became so repetitive that it became mundane and my thoughts started to creep in and I let them. Then I heard an emergency vehicle. My ears perked up as I listened to the sirens bounce off the buildings. I could visualize the architectural layout of each block the ambulance went down or approached. My mind had made a fuzzy map of my neighborhood. I eventually heard the sound of my alarm reminding me to get out of bed.