After 12 months of absence, I made final visit to my earthly parents.
I imagine it's a peculiar thing to look upon son and not really see him—
to see but a stranger in him.
Mama didn't say much, hardly anything.
She knew I had made my choice and could see the omens.
She knew her baby boy was not long for the world, was leaving.
She could see the color of my eyes changing.
She knew the secret I knew and there was nothing she could do.
Papa shook my hand.
Though not in the way he normally does.
No embrace followed, no hug.
I sensed a fear and fading love.
Woe world, when the father becomes afraid of,
his son.
We sat down,
to tea.
And if I missed it before, through their eyes, I saw it in me.
The changes were obvious.
We are,
only,
what others see.
She saw the scar had disappeared from my cheek.
I held the steaming pot of tea, she saw it didn't burn me.
Pop commented I looked younger, stronger.
I like to think I'm the same person, but no longer.
In the house I grew up in I was now a stranger.
In the people who raised and loved me I sensed they saw in me a danger .
My skin has also changed, it's texture.
A bronze like marble, to a degree impenetrable.
Below the skin I'm not as emotional.
How I feel, less and less I know.
Much of me is changing.
My former self fading.
I'm not even angry or broken anymore.
The murder of wife and kids, I've risen above it.
I'm whole:
What need have I of earthly things when I've seen what's behind the curtain?
Another world turns there that's for certain.
And as it spins about its axis, this world, the only one you know, collapses.
The Everglades, I went back there.
But took me no plane ride to get there.
No tickets, no airlines, I learned a lot in a year.
I think about it, snap my fingers, I'm there.
It was mating season again.
The giant snakes, the alligators were hungry again.
Their glowing eyes in the dark find me walking as Titan among them.
I can now communicate with them.
And although they're starving, my Will controls them!
They can sense it, I'm hardly human.
Their curiosity can taste it, my Freedom.
Mama said I talked differently,
as though someone else's voice was in me.
"Maybe.''
Or just perhaps it's the real me,
the person or thing she and Pop so long denied me.
My heritage, my destiny.
Either way, it was time to leave.
To take my leave of—
mom and pop,
the Everglades,
Tea,
the animals who wanted to eat me,
and of everything else belonging to this world I thought was important to me.
They smirked, the demons, my bodyguards, 'cause they could see.
I submitted and committed totally.
And that was the end of me,
my Humanity.
