Reborn

My salad days are over and yet
as I reach my fifty third year of passing,
I experience a paradoxical process of rebirth.
Not by re emergence from the labored womb.
Not by sprinkling of holy water over declining frame
nor by submergence under a Nile, Ganges or Jordan.

Rather a metamorphic shedding of skin:
loosening of layers of tight concepts;
forrow forged pathways of perception
which fall away from me
now revealed as
impermanent, imperfect, incomplete.

From rigid layers I slowly emerge
catching sight of familiar phenomena.
Obtuse angled now the view
through eyes from which
the scales have completely fallen.
But am I Butterfly or Snake?