250 Words: I punched the picture and left

I focused on the Elvis poster to avoid the painting.  I’d only wanted a quick browse of the LPs, not the dredging of my mind for something I can only speak about in dreadful rhyme:

In an old house in a distant place it occurred. 
A terrible memory my mind has often demurred,
Pushed back, buried deep,
Inescapable only in sleep;
When nightmares return me -
Thank God, though, not nightly.

But the picture there
Laid it all bare,
Brought back our host,
The malevolent ghost
And its countryside mansion
With bloodied flesh stanchions
Flanking the door -
And corpses of creatures lining the floors,
Its terrible eyes,
The blood curdling cries
Its birdlike fingers and thighs.

It touched my head,
Brought out all my dread
In glorious technicolour.
It drew from my mind
Every awful unkind,
Scenes that could not be any fuller -
That it made me relive,
My soul drained through a sieve
Leaving little left to use.
Shaved my brain with a chiv,
Unwilling gifts I did give
As a base for all its abuse.

This ghoul was no fool
It gave me a rule
To send others into its school.
The experience has past,
But what I then did shall last
And is why I don’t like to remember.
Those dreams in my sleep
All concern the poor peeps
I have sent to it for to dismember.

*

I lost a year after that, and have spent each since trying to forget, getting angry and frustrated when I remember. 

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Written for Faber Academy's QuickFic from the following picture prompt (there was actually a choice of three...).  
Well done to the winner and and runners-up!