Crimson Cocoon

A bright, crimson caterpillar with hopeful dreams and brighter ideas.

Bathed in the sunlight, light not red nor blue, a sunset.

I am the son, scathed by the fathered flock, it’s true that I bled.

A bright caterpillar covered in crimson, not only knocked by the wild world, but shocked by the ill-timed lightning of illness.

An illness that shut down my body, my thoughts, my dreams.

I laid there, trapped in stillness, made into a late sixteen-year stillborn.

My armor, worn and tethered, together with a mind that ran rampant, my body sought and sowed the seeds of my own doom.

A bed in the basement, a four corner room made and shaped into my cocoon.

I lay there for laying is all that I can do.

I lay there for years.

And as the years went on, my crimson turned to shades of a different hue.

Moths land on the blackberries, their feet and noses turn violet, blackened but not saddened.

Bush thorns cry out to them, hoping to prick and pry their wings, crippling them to the ground.

The now violet moths, unburdened by their beauty, fly on.

In the cocoon, I turn violet.

My mind a fresh new yellow, on the verge of tears, I sear into my mind these words.

I emerge a moth, years in the making, not ugly or broken.

I wear my scars not as burdens, but as tokens of my struggle.

A struggle that I overcame.

I form wings, not to avoid my battered past but to dream of a new future.

A bright, violet moth with hopeful dreams and brighter ideas, I fly into the crimson sky.

They’ll try to pin me back down, keep me earthbound, they’ll try.

But I’ll stay the violet vixen merged in the crimson,

And I’ll never touch the ground again.