More Old Poetry

Call them psyche; the Greeks did,

thinking they were ancestral souls,

returning like breath.

I think of them as here to show

how beauty is a whimsy.


Some say the butterfly is so named

for sorceresses, stutter-searching for sustenance,

that they are witches in disguise,

hunting for milk or butter,

left out in a pan.


The butterflies begin in his belly;

tickling with their papery wing-weight

against a stomach's satiny lining,

in the exact shape of,

symmetrical to,

her voice.


Next I see him, inches from the screen,

face grayly aglow from texting her,

barraging with words I know he's

said before-- I've said before.


The butterflies stack

against his esophageal opening,

peristalsis reversed, churning from him

the morass of every

undigested word.


I want to tell him -- metamorphose!

and make a verb out of the noun...

and make the change volitional.


I want to tell him, metamorphosis is

the eventuality of larvae.

But age is too much like an endgame,

and we become stricken with self-

consumption, like Auroboros,

consuming ourselves, tail first,

with whom or what has preceded.


Each abortive attempt at flight

unravels the pupal clothing, revealing

a sheen of worn and wispy threads;

the veneer which wants to grow,

wants to weave strands of time around us,

proving that adage of healing all wounds.


While the shrill wings of her words

stir within his organs, he is once again free

to tear and to be torn.

Poor caterpillar! Hung so naked from a tree.


Butterflies strung from a mobile

diagram our fettered hearts;

marionetted with the also-entwined.

The mobile we never outgrew from infancy

--still chained to the ceiling.


A blue butterfly skitters towards

the room's boundary.

Swooping in tight circles,

he evinces equilibrium.

A slight puff of air undoes his position,

inertia sloughed off by the slow, unceasing drag

of bodies, unattached yet bound.