Imagining Dragons

Fear is the mind killer,
the little death,
hanging our souls to dangle alone,
closing off every heart
that reaches to you,
imagining dragons and demons
that do not exist
but are deadly none the less.

Fear is the mind killer,
the little death,
painting the world as a battleground,
a place of blood and lies
because they are safer somehow
than the vulnerability
of a caress.

About this poem

I woke this morning in rare bout of fear. It took a lot of time, prayer and meditation, as well as some rigorous beating myself about the head and shoulders with truth to get past it.

The episode brought back to mind the book “Dune” by Frank Herbert, a si-fi classic I read when I was in college. The first two lines of each stanza were blatantly stolen from that book because they have been part of my mantra to push back fear for many years (as in 30+). It is as if that whole book, and it is a big one, was written to give me those two lines.

The picture of of an Alexander Calder sculpture, titled “Calderberry” that I saw in one of my artist dates.

Tom