Metamorphose
Being transformed
Black fields of burning the shade of when the flame goes out Closed lids pried open again and again by blinks of morning slipping through the closed blinds Carbon colored birds crowding on a wire whose sad song is an eternal sentence sans punctuation — these last five years of my life before I turn thirty-five come the end of October, they seem to stretch backward and forward like a pupil dilating in the darkness after daylight How it came for me like a thief in the night, the shadow of myself caught up with me, and I swallowed it down like a snake eating its tail
I fear this sound of sirens maybe the coda, the symphony of the final storm that spooks the horses trying to kick down their stalls My cocoon covered with scales starts to soften in the rain The infant longs to become the imago, and my image longs to be born The potential of my wingspan’s reach far exceeds the borders of this dormant landscape with all its underbrush and overgrowth and the tangled roots and thorns I choked down when I was hungry for more and more of self I’ve been digested and dissolved and divided then thrown together again and spit out into the world
Light breaks, warm and like a balm, not the stark, sharp bright of a winter day when the sun is too earnest in its effort to eclipse the cold, but an ochre pigment mixed with moisture, mild and soft, spreading across the earth and seeping into my skin I approach the end of the trail where I locked the gate to keep the livestock in I stare out past Interstate 130 where the highway leads to the end of a dream I’m on the verge of a world where not a single monarch survives the great migration to Mexico from the beginning to end But the living’s in the trying Reignite the flame so I can fly
Thank you for reading!
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