Your creeping tendrils reek of toil and stress,
They've taken root beneath my bed,
Your nourishment is the nightly sweat,
That drip drip drips off my forehead;
You lap it up greedily.
Every drop intensifying your desire to confuse me,
To consume me with self-doubt,
Slowly but inevitably,
Turning my mind against itself.

An unwilling host for your dark massy form,
I carry you silently dusk to dawn.
You grow fatter day-by-day,
Becoming ever more greedy night-by-night,
Taking joy in supping on my liquid fear:
Like the perfect storm at sea,
You are too big to weather.
You are a ferocious dog let slip his lead.

You have blocked all escape routes,
Your shifting, insiduous form did that stealthily,
My mind, turned-in, paralyzes me:
A mental and physical double-lock,
Confining me to my king-size prison,
Meaning you can gorge upon my misery,
Until you leave nothing but an empty shell,
Then friends and family will all agree, 
"at least now he is free of his living Hell"

Four clocks on the wall,
telling me that I’m running out of time.
There’s only me in this ghost-town,
keeper of the hands,
and I have to reset each clock
before it develops a mind
of its own.

The problem arises in that I
am flawed, and slow,
and by the time I have reset
the fourth clock,
the first is taunting me
to run back and start it all over
again.

And what’s worse?
I can no longer tell
whether I have been at this
for hours, days, months, even.
My Hell-shackles are the very thing
I am trying to push back.
I could call it a prison
of my own creation,
but I wouldn’t want to plagiarise God.

I’m having a lot of waking dreams,
like I’m hypnotised. Sometimes,
I hear voices telling me what to do
in catastrophising extremes. Set
back the clocks, or you will die one day.
Set back the clocks. Set back the clocks.
Set back the c—

I hate not being able to order things
I hate freaking out over small decisions
Catastrophising
I hate it
But more importantly I hate the way you tell me that it’s nothing.