Metamorphosis

Night of the mind after a metaphor, in the darkness
Of words seeking after their
Flesh, of the body as real as embraceable
Forms I sing. But oh this change! How many times
Were the words you read rewritten, how many times was it necessary
To raze my thoughts and then re-raise them, lazar-like,
From the sluggish dead? How many fields
Stitched together by broken limbs and quivering fingers
Must I have crossed in the moonlight, aloft
And lonely from the city's neon edge?
Before I can find my beginning (I left
When I began to climb to attain my second self --
I found him fleeing after a shadow like the shadows
All the while tumbling from the precipice of twilight
Into the depths of the night) I mourn for the loss of myself,
The revision of time, the recreation in my recreation:
How long will the low lying cliffs hold my path through the stumbling fields
Before the whole face of the mountains is changed?