Nightmare As A Child
by Michael Romani

A quiet child sits alone on the stairwell
The teacher stops to talk, listening to her tale
Over hot chocolate for two hold the marshmallow 
No fuss; no muss; no need to shout or bellow
The uncommon ingredient plays in human emotion
Where feelings such as fear raise commotion

A little girl walks hand and hand into a nightmare
The kind of a nightmare meant for two to share
The scar of a burn sparks a heated, wounded memory
Feelings of pain felt deeply in forgotten tragedy
The little girl continues to speak with familiarity
Bleeding deep like a cancer of half remembered absurdity

Outside the teacher's school was a man in a car
Lurking so familiar like a frightening mental scar
The little girl tells her that she is called Markie
Making every effort as doppelganger to show she is she
With a distant look in her mind, it falls together totally
While a scary mans comes to visit a bit too comfortably

Slowly, the conversation draws memories of dark images
Reflecting the disjointed darkness of mental blemishes
An eerie, if peaceful, conservation in the living room
As it slowly dawns that she's speaking to her mother's doom
He paints himself in his tale as the one who discovered
Speaking on her mother's body and the killer never uncovered

With a haunting, melodic twinkle of a star and undrunk cup
She learns her name was Markie and wonders what is up
Listening, glistening to her lost, suppressed memories
Step by step she shimmers and unravels her old mysteries
The lurking stranger shares a photograph of her as a child
And instantly, her inner child shows him to be reviled

Haunting, murky shadows remembered dance on a child's wall
She startles awake as she stumbles into her recall
An open door has let in the truth revealed by her inner child
And she knows, Markie is Helen before she was lost defiled
The child stares up and lays all the pain very plainly out
With all of her words removing any fragment of leftover doubt

Staring off until with a start, she realizes he's there
Leaning over her to impart further reasons to lose to fear
All of these lost and vacant years he has quietly waited
Knowing fully well who this all was destined and fated
The tussle wrestling hard at the head of the steep stairs
It ends with the killer falling end over end until there

The police at the dead man's ending scene put it together
As the detective and the psychologist stand and confer
Saved by an aggressive regression that had to come out
Is end the end, what all of this has really been about
It was weird, weird as the best of humanity's imagination
Sometimes in the end, oddly, weird is our best salvation

There she is still standing and pretty as a smile
All is well that ends well and all the while
She has been rubbing a dark spot off of life's tapestry
Resolving the soul killing cloud of dark mystery
Wiped clean with a  stolid look into the Twilight Zone
She smiles at her inner child knowing she's no longer alone

(c) August 8, 2017  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserve