METAMORPHOSIS
Conception...
Clots of blood swollen by pollination.
With tail flagellating here and there
The fetal passage to life opens
With a floodgate of blood
And chants from worlds without.
For once we formed fish
With fins and gills to swim
In the stream of Mother's pouch
With the passing of several moons
We close our fists supplicating
To the world that's no more
We stop, sobbing at the world's vanities.

Infancy...
Unrestrained tears open a new chapter
In the time of a demented tawdriness
Translated to this abridged world.
In the innocence of our insensibilities
We rave to the high heavens
Claiming dull glory with our babble.
We walk staggering like a drunk
Stomping the earth with out-sized strides
Falling with a thud in the face

Of filial hot expectations
Rising and falling, falling and rising
Till we find a lingering utopia

Adolescence...
New voices clatter in the crowd
Independent illusions cling to the heart
Vaunting with feeble steps
In the unreality of an unripe world
We coast home to deceit and escapades
Our merry gatherings offer no soothing
We clutch to one another yet not warm
Father's caws seem a drudgery
Mother's tale a stale ale
Saved in the exuberances of peers
We linger in the romance of portraits
Offering a sop to mystic Cerebus
Murmuring, kicking at the state
Like an old scold until
Puberty brazens out mind's illogic.

Adulthood...
Punctured hopes stare us naked
Our horizons seem so blurred
Inflated ambition blooms to nought
And we sit gnawed away at the heart
Chanting our jeremiads— stale songs
We sit amassing young minds to ourselves
Dishing out old stories: of better
Old days, of better straight ways
Till just in an unwary twinkle

The hourglass runs out
Slowly like the last martinet
As from salt
We swerve into dumb jinns
Opening their bloody jaws
And get swallowed by the Stygian darkness.

© NATTIE O'SHEGGZY