Demons

Demons are like death

Suffered everyday

In small and often meaningless ways

And day by day

Slip away like so many grains of sand

Falling through the fingers of one's grasping hand

As one struggles to hold on to what remains

The demons are there

In our dreams, in our private moments

To remind us of our mortality and our

Existential fragility

Demons are devils by night

But friends in the daylight

I cannot hate these things

That plague my life and steal its brightness

Casting all into shadow and darkness

I cannot hate them, for to hate them,

I think, would be to hate a part of myself

Hidden perhaps, secreted away

Demons

Daily stalk the shadows

Follow after my footsteps

And lurk about unseen spaces

Hidden from the light of day

And nightly they visit

In my dreams

To torment and talk to me

And they

The personification of lost pasts

Of feelings forgotten

And pains repressed

Seasons

Odd Ends: Perennial Poesy along the Way

2005