Mind Beast
by Dawg
In the sub-basement where cognition starts to buckle and degrade,
something blind and ravenous is sharpening its blade.
It calcifies around ambition, it dissolves the better plan,
bleeds through every aspiration into something less than man.
The beast runs corridors you’ve never charted, never crossed,
it feeds on every certainty until the signal’s lost.
No exorcism waiting, no clean place in here–
just the wet machinery of something built on fear.
It moves through REM cycles with the patience of decay,
wears the face of yesterday to hollow out today,
reconstructs your finest hours into evidence of waste,
leaves a residue of failure that you never fully erase.
It has learned your compensations, every workaround you built,
every fortress of distraction you erected out of guilt.
It doesn’t need the dark to operate, the light won’t drive it back–
the beast lives in the apparatus of the things you lack.
You can medicate the perimeter, contain it for a while,
negotiate its territory mile by measured mile,
but it’s been in residence before you knew the house was real–
the beast of the mind is the oldest bill you’ll ever fail to clear.