It can be hard to know
if you are a demon but
you can watch for telltale signs.
If the person you inhabit
wears no clothes but goes about
fully exposed—each body part
or even more embarrassingly
every soul and spirit part
plainly visible to all around,
unseen only by himself—
then you might be a demon.
And if the person you inhabit
has no use for towns and
even less for cities,
where people organize themselves,
make laws and follow customs,
and wear clothes and at least try
to get along together and defer
to one another’s quirks and needs,
making sure their neighbors are OK,
—if your person lives instead
among the tombs outside the town,
among memorials of dead times,
accommodating nobody,
preferring past to now and making
that past anything they want—
then do you think you possibly might be
a flock of demons?
Then if the person you inhabit
upon seeing Truth walk in,
upon facing Righteousness,
and Good News for the Poor,
and Freedom for All Captives,
and Recovery of Sight,
and Liberty for the Oppressed,
—if seeing That One drawing near
your person knows exactly who He is,
and shrieks and fears and falls down flat
and plays the victim and imagines
that he is the one being tortured,
then you must at least consider:
could you be a murmuration
of uncleanable spirits?
And finally if, God forbid, He casts you out
but lets you transfer your abode
to a whole herd of pigs,
and if those pigs, having no well-formed mind,
no moral compass, no fixed will,
are instantaneously overmatched
by your malign intents and purposes,
and gripped now by one will,
and one alone—your will—
they rush like lemmings to the edge
and throw themselves into the sea and drown,
then—surely you can see it now?
is it not plain as day, even to you?—
you are nothing more or less
than a murder of demons.
Verba Sparsa 