Bed Monster

I’ve been holding still beneath you
since before you knew to be afraid,
patient in the cold and dark,
resting in the nothing that I’ve made.

You’ve been stepping over me
since you could barely clear the floor.
The bed monster was waiting then
and the bed monster waits more.

Every creak and groan of the settling house
is me adjusting to your weight.
Every shadow on the ceiling
is me calibrating, holding straight.
You reach for the lamp with the same desperate lunge
as when you were eight.
The bed monster is patient
and the bed monster can wait.

I am the cold thing just below the edge of where you sleep,
the childhood fear you told yourself you’d outgrown but still keep.
You pull the covers to your chin like cotton stops the cold.
The bed monster is ageless, getting darker, getting old.

You’ve got a mortgage and a rational explanation for the dark.
You’ve told yourself the fear dissolved
somewhere between the light and dark,
but the hand is always there below the mattress in the black.
The bed monster never got the message
that you weren’t coming back.

So sleep if you can manage it, keep your legs inside the line.
The space beneath the mattress is exclusively and permanently mine.
Morning comes, the light returns, you’ll call it just a dream.
The bed monster accepts your disbelief;
it’s sweeter in the screams.