It is partly a memory or a shadow, though it has no true name. It is an echo of my accumulating dark deeds whether they be born of good intent or not. YOU could hardly imagine the cataclysmic war that threatens... no.. But I CAN see it. It promises to to tear me into several different but very real men and each of them have shown themselves this day. They wrestle in my tortured mind for supremacy. Oh the terror!! The terror when a part of you, growing larger by the year, howls in sickeningly impotent rage, it’s hateful flailing rage pushing the better parts of me away or breaking them to their knees as they become humbled before the thing that will soon define the man. This is all in my mind, but that doesn’t make it imaginary. The cowering many are but echoes of this one monster that now threatens to win the war for power over me. It was congealed, this demon, in some dark forgotten part of my being and it waited feeding on the personas that are the once and future me. I search desperately for a champion, a defender. Perhaps the boy? The poet, comedian son and brother..no.. Se petrified by the real world is he that he is quickly consumed by the beast. Maybe the boyfriend, the drinker and he that was almost a father? Nay, he was cruel and impatient and feels a kinship with the beast and allows himself to be consumed..the brawler then? The angry young man fighting for imagined morales, making believe he fights for his friends that will soon bore of him. The brawler spits at the beast, for what if his friends had learned he cowered .... TBC