A boast and a confession sit on either side of this tiny poem. The boast is the title, «I eat monsters in the dark», which could be a child proving she isn't afraid of the night, or a villain proving he is the thing to fear. The confession is everything that follows. In a handful of lines, the poem admits that swallowing something doesn't make it disappear. What goes down leaves traces: "Ghosts between your teeth."
Nothing is known here about who wrote it or when. The name on it, InfluentialKilljoys, tells us nothing certain, so the words have to carry everything. Fortunately they carry a lot.
The central idea seems to be that swallowing fear, or silence, or pain, is not the same as destroying it. The opening question, "How do you learn to swallow your toung," twists a familiar idiom. We usually say "bite your tongue," which means holding words back for a moment. "Swallow" is more drastic, as if the organ of speech itself must go down along with the words. Set beside the title, the two kinds of swallowing start to echo each other. The speaker who eats monsters and the person told to swallow their tongue are both taking things in rather than letting them out. The poem asks what that does to the mouth, the doorway between inside and outside.
The imagery makes a clever exchange. The title promises monsters, creatures that are alive, frightening, and can in principle be defeated. By the body of the poem they have become ghosts, which can't be killed, chewed or digested. Eating the monster seems to have turned it into something thinner and harder to get rid of. Placing the ghosts "between your teeth" is also oddly domestic. It recalls the shred of food you can't dislodge, a small, nagging, physical irritation, so the supernatural lands in the most ordinary part of the body. The word "ghosts" even feels lodged in its line, with the clustered "sts" sound wedged in the middle, and "teeth" ends on a hiss of breath.
The construction is more deliberate than its simplicity suggests. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, not even a question mark after "when." The question is never closed, as though the sentence has been swallowed too. Its grammar is split in an unsettling way. "There are" is stranded on its own line, and its capital "T" mid-sentence makes it look like a fresh start. The reader pauses over those two words, over nothing, before "Ghosts" arrives. The lines shrink as the poem goes on, from a long, breathless first line to the stark pair at the end. Even the spelling "toung" is worth a glance. It is probably a slip, but the clipped word suits a poem about cutting speech short, and it makes the tongue look a little mutilated on the page.
The last stanza changes the poem's direction. Until now "you" could be anyone, a general you. "Your mouth is a horror / My friend" turns the poem into direct address, and the line reads like a flat verdict, close to a two-beat chant: your MOUTH is a HORror. "My friend" gets a line to itself, and its tone can't be settled. It might be tender, a hand on the shoulder after a hard truth. It might also be chilling, the courteous menace of a villain in a story. Both readings survive. The mouth may be horrifying because of what it holds back, the unsaid things stuck in it. Or it may be horrifying because someone who eats monsters risks becoming a monster's mouth.
That ambiguity is what makes the poem worth rereading. It takes the old story of the brave person who faces the dark and asks what it costs. The danger is no longer out in the night but lodged in the body, in the place where we speak, eat and swallow. The poem has no triumph in it, and it ends on a single, uneasy word of friendship.