The road was long and rough
It was a passageway of words
A parade of letters and prose
The touch of invisible pleasure
I moulted like a snake in season
I dreamt on a cruiser of reign as we
opened my pandora box in the cave

The road was smooth and right
It was a third eye paradise of seers
A mire of misery and blowing wind
The tears flew like fireflies on heat
I met the shrinks of souls in salt bed
I waved the rain as it washed my sins
On that sight of the pandora box

The road of wrongness and rightness
It was an unfolded augury of life
An awakened sleeper roared in dreams
The days when I touched the skies
I took the broken house and mended
I saw the clouds as bright as crimson
Inside the box when I met my twin

The road of love, lust, love, longness
It was when the ember coal was wild
A blaze of soul collision and resonance
The days when doubt taunted in mazes
I wrested my mind and the heart knew
I tested the precipice and intuition led
Inside the unconditional pandora box  

The road where I hid and felt alive
It was a paradise of shining trees
A place where our loneliness merged
The safest heaven on barren lands
I saw my warrior and he shielded
I sat as he ran away with fear and pride
On that very opened pandora box

The road of unforgotten forever
It was a triangulation of continents
An immersion of difference and indifference
The open table of a scarce connective mess
I shed my naive bed and hardened
I shut the wild untwisted world
On that very inevitable pandora

This thing, the words and all?  I was trying on a new skin.
It was made of the old -the familiar, too, but transformed.
Something added that could take root,
Take me out from the norm.
Take on a new identity.
Perform.
Squinting at a light, held at arm’s length:
My own spotlight.
So you could watch me act it all out,
Over and over, forever on the page.
but nothing ends as it began.
My troubles, my worries, my lust, my greed,
All fictionalized and petty.

Disgust and shame.
Anger and fear,
Are not advisable
Unless they bring about change.
Even those, now left behind.
Moulted.
Shedding my old skin.
Toughening up the new.

Crawling. I've been crawling. Down in the dirt on my abdomen. Searching for a tree to cling to. To hang from upside down. To take a step into the chrysalis. To be born a new.
This skin I wear, encases me. When I've moulted I will be free. I will escape the confounds of bone and flesh. Of time and space. Of birth and death.
When I pass. When I pass through this knot. The knot in the infinite line of things. I will pass through biology, enter into a state beyond. Beyond our senses. Beyond our limitations. With nothing to gravitate towards.
The butterfly, it calls to me. My day is coming, it will be free.
It's been inside of me. Been here all along. Waiting to come out.
I am not the skin I wear. I am not the title I bear. I am, I am!
We're all larva. We all got butterflies inside of us. Come and crawl with me. Get down on your abdomen. We're gonna find a tree. To hang from, and set the butterfly free.

We live in times of innovation.
Winds of change affront the nation;
wind most welcome – by a few
(the masses know not what to do
with engineered progressive change,
their morals slow to rearrange).
And thus, in ornithology
we find an apt analogy…

Phoenix-like the vulture rose
in rainbow raiment, from repose
Its plumage all askew – a freak:
a mutant with a painted beak
borne of winds but lately blown.
This strange new hybrid (yet unflown)
did twitter forth an avian boon.
It preened its plumes and croaked a tune:

“I represent that rarest fowl,
far wiser than outmoded owl…
A dazzling swan of change am I
brought forth to liberate the sky!”

(Yet more appeared a fractured emu;
fair is fowl post-op… they tried to
cross said emu with an ostrich!
(What the hell – the surgeon got rich
changing apples into – mangos;
altering the twos to tangos…)

Fresh from gender suicide
he moulted into she. Beside
herself (itself?) with grief, regarded
previous selves as false: discarded
Sir for Madam overnight;
fixed it, mixed it, made it right.
Since God was wrong the first time ‘round,
Man (or something) thus is bound
hormonally to tweak and mutate,
hastening rebirth’s freakish due-date.

A manly bass – and yet the face
was poorly paired in his/her case
Soprano ought to have resounded –
yet the voice left one confounded.

Rainbow bracelets notwithstanding
this was clearly modern branding
(on the forehead – like a beast?)
well, Jesus said the truth at least:
that angels are of neither gender
(hence no need to check the member.)

Lest we offend endangered species
I commend transgendered theses –
paired with warning and a fable
as they turn the feathered table:

We may nurture fair to foul
while nature shrieks a hideous howl
but foul to fair cannot return;
thus trapped, both Eve and Adam burn.

My dance pants of long ago
Were like a second skin to me.
Fingertips trace the faded pattern;
Affirmation, that yes,
Like a mature rattlesnake
This skin that has been moulted
Once belonged so rightly to me.
A perfect fit.

I have outgrown these, now,
My dance pants of long ago.
My fingers yearn to try them on again;
To feel the smooth fabric cling to my thighs
To jump about in them;
Twist;
Laugh;
Love again.

I try them on.

She wore shells from her ears, sprinkled in sand,
diamonds for eyes, and dressed in sheets of silk,
kissing the air below her as she stepped through
the blackened waters of the nearby pond.

The novel in my hands slid from my grasp,
the pages that were once dyed the colour of milk
quickly moulted into grey ghosts. The adventures
of the brave captain sunk to the bottom of the pond.

Ruby nails with a shimmering glaze caressed the
morning sun, with eyes that that borrowed the silver
edge of the moon. With a smile that promised untold
wonders, she slowly carved her way through the pond.

All questions and queries vanished from my mind,
the divine tone of her skin making my heart quiver.
It is only when I had the courage to look at her reflection
did I realise that something inhuman was standing in my pond.  

Even through screams, I was still dazzled by her grace,
the way she tore through flesh making my bones shiver.
Crimson pools trickled along the stone floor, a gritty reminder
to all about the foolish poet who had broken his bond.

Little things,
of enormous weight
Lie cluttered,
across slippery time
Who like dripping drops,
with their past, rhyme

As the friendly study table,
silently moulted wood-dust
Kitten-y childhood of two,
slowed into,
feline youths of one
Stickers, posters,
paintings, drawings - they did fade
Coz for colours youth paints,
brushes there invade

Tomorrow I return,
and on my room, the door shall close
and my childhood friends -
pen stands, beds, chairs, windows
will silently mourn
Cursing the shackles
that forbid them,
from joining me along

But wooden they are,
not knowing,
that many hells worse
is roaming the world,
with the soul forever shackled
to where your first steps unfold

Congratulations on your 70th Birthday!
I hope you have a really lovely day
Even though, both top and bottom,
You've moulted or turned silver grey.

The relic memory of my past
Barren girl like the empty fields
She’s a ghost in the fairy land
A ****** spot in the golden city
Tears veiling mine eyes
A tumbling, rumbling, wrung life

You are the incarnation of the ancestral me
Tears veil my eyes
I know what awaits you
I am the knight not
But mine eyes shall light thee in the dark
I rose into the heavens
Like smoke from the ashes
Moulted my life
And bolted from tribulation

Now I’m a queen of the human race
Now they are full and round
Now they roll like the full moon
Now they are jolly
My kindness, a tribute to humanity
Do not let the whimsical life wean you from prayer