THE TWENTY SECOND YEAR

SELF-PORTRAIT AS REVELATION

It has taken me years to admit I am afraid to live.
The unberable now won't unwrap its tentacles

from around me. I emerge from the dark cocoon
some might call skin, viscid & decidedly unhuman,

with questions far older than shame burning my tongue.
Who took my name? Who marked me? Who is—

& who is not—an abomination? It has taken me years
to accept the terrible fact of my making. My innocence

never mattered & neither did my guilt. There is no mythology
where I am not miscreated or misnamed or born into

or from someone's suffering. It is never enough to be made
& then remade in someone else's image.

It is never enough to become someone else's image.
It is never enough to become someone else.