Demon To hear the poet read "Demon," click . Cars stalled, the light gone hazy under leafless sycamores-- nature's diction, as casual as you asking for a last glass of water, whispers in my ear words cotton-mouthed and sere as sloughing bark littering the roadway, rush hour traffic halting, faltering like my hand the day I signed away your flesh to the crematory fire ... Now, the white lines' dot and dash makes my hand less steady on the wheel, the stoplight glimmers a shade too red-- the faith I've never felt in the day to day haunts me like some imp-winged demon in a Bosch painting, its infantile, red-bawling face staring accusingly into my eyes as if it dared to fly beyond the gilt frame, hectoring, hovering, sluggish wings buzzing like the winter-hatched fly stumbling spastic against the dashboard dials, its frail internal compass somehow gone haywire overridden by spurts and shocks. Beneath the roadside sycamores, as if a newsreel unspooled in my head, I see a squirrel, gaunt, great-eyed as a prisoner half-starved, its face dissolving into the demon's face ... so like my father's face quizzical, half-angry, pinched by death; and then, at the end, grown grave, calm ... mendicant as a fly, its legs bent as if to pray, the great swivelling head a friar's black hood, Mephistophilis disguised --Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it ... Among the quivering needles the fly smashes, its imp-wings glimmering in the cooling light, its demon eyes shattered into broken mirrors replicating ad infinitum car car car car tree tree tree ... now it lands on the steering wheel and faces me: What do I look like in the eyes of a fly? Shattered into nose lips eyes do my jittering faces swarm like harbingers of the demon in my own last act who takes off his hood and shows me my signature signed in blood ... ? but it's you, isn't it? you staring out from those bulging eyes asking frankly for my sympathy, yet timid, apologetic, only doing your job-- my familiar flying through rising fumes to drag me from my car.