in a yesterday schoolroom I translated Metamorphoses: Cadmus, Acteon, and Semele - victims of divine caprice and pantheon’s spite, their transmogrification not as tragic as it should have been in my imagination

so aware was I of my wrong skin, my wrong form, which showed no reflection of who I wished to be or of the spark within, that -  if there had been gods - I would have seen as kind their cruel intervention peeling the layers away or burning to effect transformation to leave me new, acceptable to those looking on –reinvented, re-presented, a Bacchus bis natus, twice-born

yet such divinities do not exist. I woke each day and knew my imperfections to be as unaddressed as lead resists alchemy - my irreducible being of mortal clay and hopeful gnosis damned to endure this earthly course unchanged with no redemptive metamorphosis