I found that if I wanted to get anywhere in this life,

I had to learn to name the demons

who choke devotion with a thousand lies,

 

Those wicked fiends that appear in my thinking

and drive my attention in a thousand directions,

like a leaf tormented by the storm

 

There is that demon who clings to the force of attraction

like a bad smell that disrupts the moment

the demon who takes the primal energies of my youth

and thwarts them with illusions

who promises sand castles

by making them appear to be made of stone,

 

And there is that demon who moves my attention towards the future,

who stirs anxieties and fears about the unknown,

His lies have me living in a world of tomorrows

those misanthropic trains with ghost passengers

that never seem to arrive as promised,

 

And there is that demon who strokes the tender discord of past memories,

If ever I have fallen, it is written in his script,

He is friends with a world of half-understood sensations,

He thrives on repression, whispering into my ear,

“Please reject this. Please ignore this. Don’t look at me,”

The unexamined past is the fruit of his diabolic devotion,

 

And then there is the demon of self-esteem,

the Elders of the Desert taught me volumes about his trade,

How he stirs the desire to be loved

and distorts it into a charade of compliments and accomplishments,

He gives out the trinkets of fame as a kind of fool’s gold,

a bright shining illusion which warms the heart for a season,

but soon shrivels as craving replaces stillness,

 

I name these demons to attack them with the furnace of my anger,

Too many poets have fallen in love with them,

Too many artists have traded the true love of the Divine indwelling

for their counterfeit currency,

 

I whisper them to my fathers,

that they may teach me to rise above their seductions,

and in the Holy Spirit,

I slay them with the sword of my mouth,

And that is how I learned the art of stillness and surrender,

by learning to speak the creative word of prophecy

over the chaos of the interior life.