Metamorphosis

Upon waking Facebook informs me 
my account’s been suspended due to suspicion
that I’m not an actual person,

and I want to make this travesty of reason
into a poem about how the interwebs
are the new underworld and this brazen theft

of my personhood is a symbolic death
by isolation – no, a punishment,
lived out in the internetartarus,

perpetrated by the invisible lords of creation,
so I try combing The Metamorphoses,
for some edgy mythical references,

but it’s so much with the death and rape
and people becoming trees and animals,
it occurs to me if it got turned

into a movie it’d be a snuff porn.
So I wander out on the porch to console myself 
trying to create an image of importance

by pacing and pausing with my cigarette,
and then that two-year-old appears
in the neighbor’s window, waiting for me

once again to become Sir Fantastic
of the Magic Ballooning Cheeks
that helium me up on tiptoes,

my fingers now pins bursting the illusion,
leaving me flying down onto the deck,
disinflated and rich with the child’s laughter,

sharp and audible through the pane, and
my soul awakens, begins to imagine me
through pictures of children who might still incarnate:

this one the architect of the Lincoln Log
megalopolis that spans a bedroom;
this one sings garland onto the Tree;

this one, who dives, flying-squirrel-like
from trampolines, known far and wide for braving
the ropeswing and hollering kersplosh

in the still chilled water of just new June;
this one, who learns bird calls and sneaks in strays,
makes small graves for roadkill, and dies too young –

while the real boy is pounding his window,
loudly, screeching cacophonous encores,
and not for a second thinking my trance

was anything more than a part of our game,
already poking his own swollen face
with tiny fingers in preemptive mimesis,

clapping hysterically at his exploding cheeks,
delighted beyond reason in this moment,
this innocent glimpse into how quickly

he can be taken by whim and transformed.




Michael Collins is a graduate of Kalamazoo College, the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, and Drew University, where he completed an MA in British and American Literatures. He teaches creative and expository writing in the Paul McGhee Division of the School for Continuing and Professional Studies, a liberal arts college within New York University. His work has appeared recently in Glasschord Art and Culture Magazine, Mad Swirl, Danse Macabre, BlazeVOX, and Eunoia Review.  It will also be included in upcoming issues of Brevity Poetry Review, Inclement Poetry Magazine, Constellations: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction, The Subterranean Quarterly, Ginosko Literary Journal, Subliminal Interiors, Red Savina Review, Grist: The Journal for Writers, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, and SOFTBLOW. He lives in Mamaroneck, New York, with his wife, Carol.