a caterpillar crawls from its pink shell. 
I don’t know what impelled it to be born.    Perhaps its sixteen legs were cramped.
Or was it hungry for a jambu leaf?
Its bulbous head emerges           as it chews its way to face this world.  

In the courtyard Alexis            lights another cigarette, oblivious 
to its birth on the branch above her. 
She only sees the ghost of her lost love              not me, her friend,                                                      
nor the sorrowful eyes of her husband come      to bring her ironed clothes
and a bottle of shampoo.                              

Gummy black bristles sprout round a bulbous body           a squirming brush.
Filaments spray from tips    detecting danger.                                                                                                             
Done with its dark mask      two legs peel it back like a motorcycle helmet.
Reveal a jelly-green bubble of a face      
a humungous mouth           designed to devour            all the green around it. 

One gnawed leaf falls on Sergeant Lino,                                                                                                                      
the cop who tortured seventeen subversives. 
He trembles at the thought                  of electric shock.                                                                                         
Hopes no one hears the screams that echo    in his skull as he stares in stupor                                                                         
at a buzzing blizzard on TV.                                                                                                            

The caterpillar        bright white now      twists like snowflakes in this heat
until it sheds its coat       then eats it.         Its new skin flashes blue and green              
with                              two orange circles underneath.                                                                                                                                                  
Curling in a desiccated leaf                                it spins a tawny nest                                                                                              
a cocoon to rest       and yield a silken purse of fashion.                                                                       

Dona Yara, that silver-haired lady with rattling teeth       once a famous pianist                     
hidden in our ward by her rich sisters                                                                                                                  
will never use that purse                        not ever                                                                                             
nor will Lourdes              the raven-haired beauty who found her daughter floating in a tank. 
They cannot see the silk cocoon from the dreaded second floor               where the steely-eyed
nurse          threatens to send us all forever.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
The Atlas Moth arises   in angelic and demonic splendor.                                                             
Her massive wings unfold            a twelve-inch spread                                                                                   
blood-orange seas with sailboats afloat upon them.     Snow-capped mountains 
paint the edges.     Golden snakeheads menace from the tips

Her voracious caterpillar mouth is gone      no mouth to feed at all a life so fleeting.

              But look             how she completes her journey            from beast to beauty   
free            from grief or shame                               or any moral compass.                                                                                                                                                                          

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