Host
Host was written for a Creative Writing course in May of 2019, when I was in my second year of college
This poem is, on the surface, about someone discovering something living within them. This parasite takes over their body over the course of the work, and by the end, the parasite and host are one.
This is mean to communicate the feeling of mental illness and how it encroaches into your personality and identity. I struggle a lot with my mental health, and I have felt at times that the darker parts of myself, the illness, consumes me whole.
Themes:
- Mental Health
- Paranoia
- Parasite/Host
The thing that lives inside of me wants out.
It has tendrils threaded like muscle that have wrapped
around the beating of my heart,
taking hostage the pumping of my blood in demand of
something unknown to me.
But, it slowly kills, and through the hollow pupil of my
eye,
I can see the writhing of some fleshy mass suckling at the
wrinkles of my brain.
It’s as though I lose myself when it pulses;
my consciousness fades in a sick rhythm as the pressure
pulls tighter like
a bow string ready to snap.
I’m getting too big for my body,
overfilled with meat and bone and ready to burst out at the
seams.
It pushes at my nerves, presses against the skin,
and now threads poke out my nostrils,
slither out the canals of my ears,
birthing from my throat to shroud around my tongue,
weaving through the gaps of my teeth,
and I can feel it.
I can feel now.
I am you.
This person's mental
illness, that darkness inside of them, is becoming uncontrollable. It
wants out, to present itself freely.
It slowly kills,mental illness is draining -- it's a killer of the mind and emotions. It sucks the life out of you, as much as it can, like a parasite sucking the blood of its host.
Their own sense of self is fading into their mental illness.
It has take over;
this person's issue, whatever it may be (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc).
has consumed them.