Exorcising Demons.

I remember when I was a little child and my mom was having "problems"
My grandma got my mother and I all dressed up and took us on to a
tacky conference room in a mid-priced hotel
in one of the grey, nameless suburbs around Dallas.
We dutifully filled a row of scratchy, magenta chairs.
Our little family led by one of her friends from the apocalyptic bible study she taught,
another old lady, with a fiery helmet of hair, and glasses like windshields.
I was on the end, next to a pale man with a sunken face
a little wisp of hair on his head.
He kept bumping into me with his legs
and I would press closer to my pillow-like grandma.
I almost burrowed under her artificial tit when he began to growl,
a low rumbling,
as the preacher walked down between the chairs
searching each face with his beady, eagle eyes.
The corpse-like man next to me shot out of his chair screaming like a banshee
ready to rip out those piercing eyes to escape whatever hole they burned in his soul.
He was stopped by a raised bible and fell in the floor,
confessing in tears that he was a child molester,
possessed by demons.

During that time my mom threw out all of her Alice Cooper albums,
thinking they were somehow a portal to hell,
and opted for the musical stylings of a former touring keyboardist from Santana
who sang, "got a born-again woman" in a slow-minded parody.
But at night she would still see the red eyes in the shadows
when she drank too much.
If I heard her crying
I would try to remind her of the blank check my grandma gave the preacher,
he said it would save us from ever being afflicted.

But, even, when my grandma lay dying
she whispered in my ear that the woman across the hall in the cold hospital
would come into her room at night and snakes would pour from her skull,
she would try to steal her soul.
And, after she was gone my grandpa would scream in the darkness,
as he fell into madness,
alone in their bedroom,
"Help me, help me, the demons are trying to take me!"

There must have been insufficient funds in the family account for salvation.

At night, when I lay in bed unable to sleep these memories that haunt me
and the pain that my broken body feels
must be the demons that are dragging the little boy to hell.