It’s Coming For You

It’s coming for you
as you have always known it would,
coming with its purposeful tread,
coming out of its own Stygian depth—

as if a howling wind you cannot see,
as if rattling-boned mortality,
as if a pinprick light at tunnel’s end,
as if time whistling around the bend:

all these and none of them.

It’s coming for you,
the thing you know of but do not know,
the thing you have sensed
flitting in the backrooms of your thoughts,

that phantom, that apparition
that has never shown its face,
that ravenous parasite,
the shadow of your shadow:

the alien within.