Demon Skeptic of Demons

Spare me story’s pieties.
Human lives are crammed with tales
Except in those rare persons
Incapable of language.

Humans are marinated
In stories from infancy,
Until death or dementia
Robs us of our narratives,

Robs our narratives of us.
Seven, eight billion people
Alive on the Earth at once

Means sufficient habitat
For thousands’ thousands’ thousands
Of tales, ranging from fragments

To mythos, orchestrated
Cosmologies, serial
Epics with no conclusions.

A few super-narratives
Dominate, inhabiting
Billions of persons at once,

But every human conveys
Private tales, local gossip,
Half-digested bits
Of family lore,

Dreams hammered to memories
Never spread to other lives.
Don’t tell us tales are precious.
That’s just what tales would tell us.