And Also The Trees - Gone... Like The Swallows (1986)

The Monster

..." I will watch with peace the
calm tongue of the tide
licking from the sand
the unclean story of my heart."
-Edna Saint Vincent Millay

The Monster that resides within me, dormant and waiting, waiting and cruel, soon enough to come invade my psyche and pervade my efforts to be wholesome, to be good. My personality, my values, have long suffered the trickery of the Monster. The Monster never announces its arrival, but comes suddenly amidst the flowers and the sun they begin to wilt and the black pitch covers the casket of the sun and transforms all reality into a nightmare. The nightmare is no dream; it is as real as the hurricane that devours, kicking apart the land, destroying the homes and lives of people. Goodbye security; you have been ripped from me. There is no shelter; I am naked, standing like a tortured child before a pack of indecent pedophiles. The Monster kills me slowly and laughs, bitter hysterics as my friends and companions turn away and disappear as if I were grotesque and stale garbage. I get lost and there is no control to hold me down as I catapult into the regions of man that defile. The Monster makes me hate. The monster makes me Hell. Just how long will it abuse my life? Forever. When it ceases temporarily to toy with me and make of my life a brutal war, I feel as if I were reviving from a blackout, a coma. The evil may take leave for a time, bit its Hell, a thick resin, traumatizes the human left in me. I wake slowly to find the wreckage consuming and overwhelming. How do I fix this disturbance? How do I apologize and explain that I am not evil after I have smeared disaster across lives and vandalized the comfort of too many homes?  When will the monster trespass again and transform me into a bleak and hateful creature? When? This is the question that terrifies me day after day. This is the unknowing that makes me so close to the dead.

- A Dozen Winters Of Loneliness