NaPaMo NZ Day 14 - scared?

[just mercedes]

Lock up your monsters
 
 
Trimontagog lived
in a cave under the cliff
at Sandy Bay.
 
You could hear him
sometimes: a clatter and grumble
like rocks churned, a rusty taste
of anger, seeping cold -
 
we were happy to stay away.
Our father named him
for something he’d seen in Syria
during the war
 
but deep down we all knew
he was our taniwha.

---

Ovinaphobia

You think I carry summer in my blood
when I don’t use a sweater,
when the wind chills and the trees are bare.

You wonder why I drink coffee
in the evening till I resonate
with the stars, never noticing
that I’m too afraid to close my eyes.

You believe I’m an atheist
when I refuse to go to church
to meet Jesus, the Lamb
of God, who takes away the world’s sin.

---

Haunted
 
 
Forbidding Gothic facades led into
a labyrinth of torture, madness, grief,
where bricks and stones oozed screams, and you
can hear them still when surf attacks the reef
 
at Seacliff, where they locked up Janet Frame,
sedated her for being diff’rent, took
electric pulses dancing through her brain
like rearranging pages in a book.
 
Her fame had spread in time to halt the op.
‘Lobotomy’ was just the latest craze,
‘Unsexing’ where they sterilized, had stopped
so ECT led patients to the maze.
 
We’re all so scared of going mad, yet fools
we must be, just to live here. That’s the rules.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacliff_Lunatic_Asylum