There are no demons,
Only sky-deep cries for love
And life abundance,
And touch transparency of gaze to gaze,
Each one a chrysalis unfolding to mild air–
Cries that take their mazy paths
In the shimmering of corporal mind.
They find secreted nooks,
Bounce echoes off concavities and rises,
Twisting back
To the mind’s palette of paints
And breathing scents,
Pass over neural quadrants of parted waters,
Then may plunge
Into lovers’ words or poets’ antic turns,
Or prophets’ pungent bird calls
That alert, revive, or smite.
Or they may fall to searing red and half-lit words
That make us think a demon
Thinkable.
But there are no demons.
Some cries go awry,
Shatter on static,
Fall afoul of other cries into cacophonies,
Or ropes of rattling compulsions.
Gone awry colossally
Or pestilentially,
Gathered up to tribal scale
In plangent paranoiac ideologies,
The cries may sweep a people’s fear
Into imploding overtones
And turn it back in killing-fields on victims.
Then our evil
Is Evil.
And yet there are no demons.
Color
Somewhere at a moonlit water’s edge
Quiet will overtake them–the cries.
A sacred lotus word of contemplation, [no stanza]
Feather light,
Will catch their tones,
As a feathered, basket-woven dream catcher
Color Sways above a sleeping Miwok child,
Catching the good dreams’ colored scenes.
For moments short as breaths
And long as sleep
A feather word
Will soothe and sift the cries,
All of them,
From baby squalls of rage
To wails of warrior elegies
Reverberant on canyon walls
For boon companions lost.
And then we’ll know there are no demons,
Only the inmost circle of silence,
Face behind our pulsing cries.