You know them well,
those painfully ubiquitous twinges,
mocking your every footstep, your every utterance,
With their deviled tongues. They are your

Demon spirits.
You know them well.

When you were a child,
They'd crouch within you and
beat the frail, plum sized drum within your chest,
setting house fires in your extremities and defiling your senses
so that pearly beads of liquid would run over you
like tears running down a steaming copper kettle.

When this happened, you'd be incapacitated, you'd scream at them to leave.
They'd laugh.

They'd perform their hellish rituals in jarring response to
little things. Like
Spiders
Snakes
High places
Dark closets
Undersides of beds

They kept a list.

Time
would pass slowly, and this list would undergo ferocious editing
in which snakes and spiders would be etched out and replaced with
bigger things. Like
Losing work
Running out of money
Being diagnosed with cancer

You still lose yourself to them now and again.
But you're getting better.
You've learned to ignore them, to accept them as the mother sparrow accepts the cat stalking nearby.
You battle their cackles with the time honored weapons of deep breathing and determinedly focusing your addled mind.

They're still there within you.
They still smash your tender pulse against the back of your neck
They still torture the underside of your skin with heat
They still throw ice across your bones and seal your joints with rusting keys
They still send unhelpful messages pouring through your conscious.

They'll never leave.
You know that.
But that doesn't mean you can't go on.