Tuesday, October 31, 2017

How to Starve Your Demons, or Why I Stopped Looking at Social Media After the 2016 Election (Day 286)

How to Starve Your Demons, or 
Why I Stopped Looking at 
Social Media After the 2016 Election


When I look at you,
peacefulness recedes.

The turquoise seas dry,
revealing their soft

underbellies, which
harden and crackle, 

a vast desert of 
shattered tempered glass. 

When I look at you,
fragile as I’ve grown,

something in my heart
stirs—awakening

a sense of dread—that
lives apart from me,

a burning creature
eternal and dark,

who crept in and stayed
after he arrived.

So I endeavor
to starve my demon

by never looking,
even askance, at 

you, summoning, and
ever beckoning

concealed in your blue 
like a false hero.


(c) 2017, by Hannah Six

Image: Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's 
"Descent into the Maelstrom" 
by Harry Clarke (1889–1931), 
published in 1919 (via Wikimedia)

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