Halloween

This is a poem about someone who is haunted every year, I wanted to capture how fears change as we get older

A creak in the floor,

a howl at the moon,

Witching hour is upon us

The hour that brings me doom

Ever since I was a child,

since I slept in my own bed

When Halloween arrives

The Witches and Ghouls enter my head.

At the age of two the told me stories

about the fierce things that live in the wood,

the werewolves who eat you alive

and how all the good things die.

At the age of four the monsters came,

ugly and hideous and mean

They made me stay up all night,

forcing me to join in their plight

At six the psychiatrists put me on meds,

thinking it would stop them get in,

but the demons got darker and sat on my bed

talking about how much I had sinned

At ten the nightmares started to change,

angry clowns haunted my room

with red balloons and bloody faces

And I screamed until I was sedated.

At thirteen the unlucky number came,

but my haunts were no longer childish,

the voice of failure entered my head

and I started to long to join the dead

At fifteen the nightmares were no longer yearly,

My life was one itself

No Ghoul could get to me that night,

The drink had claimed myself.

At sixteen I laid awake on the ward

with the teenagers who had mental disorders,

I waited up for the witches to come 

but the morphine meant my brain was out of order

At seventeen I was back in my own bed,

the world was black and bleak

the old ghosts, who had scared me before,

I welcomed back, the familiar clique. 

At eighteen I was no longer scared,

The Ghosts and Ghouls, 

The Witches and Werewolves

And the clowns with their red balloons stood,

forming a red and black sea,

but the mirror I could see my reflection in showed,

That the scariest thing was me.

Author's Note

I have left this ambiguous as to if you think the the monsters in the poem are real or if the character has a mental disorder such as schizophrenia. The poem has an irregular rhyme scheme to represent the disarray the character is in.