I was born twice.
Once out of my mother in the late winter of 1986 at 1:52pm in the afternoon.
And then again
the day Samantha Li died.

That may sound more dramatic than it is or just as dramatic as it was.
I wasn't a fancy baby. I pooped like all of them. Was a little underweight. Up through high school.
"Pointy."

I didn't know her well- Sam. Just a sweet-faced angel with a cloud of black hair and questioning blue eyes who went to my
University. She always looked like a china doll unexpectedly caught in a sale at a vintage clothing shop. She played the violin.

When you lose a skill you've had all your life, things start to morph and mutate. You feel superhuman and alien at the same time.
Waking up with my right arm bones in pieces was the start of my evolution- I became wolverine- flying through the night to
have metal clicked into my arm.
I was lucky to be alive.

4 years later, a surgeon told me people often lose their arms from such an injury. The irony of receiving such news was to
want to punch him in the face with my dominant hand.
That guy dodged a time-delayed bullet.

I grew up with a planned dream woven from music notes and CD cases.
I wore second hand clothes, I drank milk drained from a food-stamp fountain. The kids laughed at me in school. They
circled constantly, questioning my glasses, my shoes, my speech.
But the music inside me was something they never had. It was my boat. Violin was going to get me to the far off shore.

But you'll find- as we grow our dreams change shape. They don't fit into the holes for the pegs our parents carved.
I shunned the 6 hours of solitary scales and Bach.
I sought the Cacophony of improvisation and orchestral arrangements.
You'll never make it here- he said. You want to help people.

So I left Siberia and took up my own vision. As we do.

Now my dreams are putty again. Melted play dough on a radiator shelf.
I have leapt through hoops ringed with fire, smoldering plastic and lies.
Filed the paperwork for a better life.
In 27 I see the lines.

They weren't there that night.
And now they're everywhere. On my arm, over the Adamantium.
At the crinkle in the arch of my nose and eyebrow.

A grey hair at my crown.

How will it come?
When they go? When we finally draw the bottom line.

And when the metal leaves me
and all my bones are earth. That will be the 3rd rebirth.