Becoming and Unraveling

Duality Series #3

Take a peek through the looking glass and experience poetry from both sides of the veil in my “Duality” series where I collaborate with different poets to cover contrasting yet interlinked themes in our individual styles.

Today’s themes are “Becoming and Unraveling”

In thematic order, “Becoming” is by myself,

The Forgotten Muse

while “Unraveling” is by

S y l v i A 🌞 K a l i n A

Enjoy!

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Boreas by John William Waterhouse - (1903)

Becoming - The Forgotten Muse

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BECOMING

I look but my eyes no longer see.
I listen but my ears no longer hear.
I sip the drink of my people,
but it turns bitter in my mouth.

My head feels heavy, teetering precariously as if my neck can no longer bear its weight.

My skin feels too tight, 
as if it too, can no longer contain me.

I sit on the precipice.

Evolving.
Emerging.
Coming into being.

This metamorphic catalyst of prophecy, 
feeding me tendrils of awakening. 
Nourishing and depleting my core with flux and fixity.

Two things are true.
I am Deviant splendour.
I am Conforming Decay. 

Gaudium and Tristitia, vying for control. 
Am i the withered fig, or the phoenix of old?

This familiar form.
This shell of memory.
Will it simply cease to be?
Or will it just be…more?

Perhaps there’s nothing to be at all?
Is this all just a dream?

Delirium?
Delusion?

© The Forgotten Muse 2025

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Salvador Dali, Galatea of the Spheres (1952)

Unraveling - Sylvia Kalina

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Shutters thrown wide at the sounds of cicadas as I lift my limb from where it lies beside me. When did I travel to the sylvan side when I could have sworn that a lightning bug’s song sang me to sleep last with its sodium oxide breath while I watched her hang twinkly ornaments in the sky from my river raft. And what of this branch that won’t bend? I think I need to sneeze from seeing all this green. What is the relationship between memory and reality?

When I was young the willows would joke that the swallows weren’t really acrobats if they couldn’t swing from their strings while I day dreamed of swallowing one to see if it felt like butterflies. But who am I to say such things of such a legendary creature who survived fire thrown at its wings. And now as I lay here stiff and cold they have moulded me a cup of clay delivering warm spring. Truth be told being spherical around the edges blurs perceptions when you get old.

I look at you with cecropia vision you with your hyena smile smelling yellow, me as a tree looking through history attempting to solve the mystery of why my frog legs weren’t quicker when you grew sinister. Today I will let my knees buckle, I will tumble and crumble —fall this frame of a woman into a girl who swam in the ocean to find a cave entering a quarter note and returning whole. Still this silk from moth and moon isn’t always enough to mend a mind full of nuclear mysticism.

My thoughts are painted clocks melting while I swirl their colours with my tongue for a taste to anchor me, though I quite like when I fade into lemon and tangerine, my outlook sanguine with sunset’s lavender lips kissing my petals. They say I’m unraveling, maybe it’s true, my elbows just yawned, bored with ideas of serving copper penny sun-beams in Wedgwood (they don’t know that it steadies their little red corpsicals). Whose measure of sanity dictates the boundaries of belief?

© Sylvia Kalina 2025

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I’m The Forgotten Muse — a poet, a storyteller, and a kindred spirit to anyone who’s ever felt lost in their own mind. I hope my words have struck a chord in your heart and may our paths cross again soon. Please consider subscribing today and making a small donation to stay in touch and support me.

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