Swinging Doors

A visionary
beyond the swinging Doors
signals to me
that from that side
he sees me
as I should be.

I tell myself it won’t be
a momentous occasion
at all to
walk through them
to meet him.
Without fanfare, without
ceremony, I step before him
and ask what it was he saw
back there before
I crossed over
to this space.

He explains
that it can’t possibly be
of any import now
for me to know that
since I’m on the side of the Doors
where the Angel Of Redefinition lives
and the nature of the passage
is that you are no longer who you were
before you came through.

When I demand to know anyway,
to have a complete explanation
for that past,
he shoos me back through
to wait my next turn.

Through fear
and a stubborn insistence
upon certainty
regarding my identity
I have lost
an opportunity to be
new,
and now I’m stuck here rueing
the desperation that drove me
to strand myself
in the muck of what
I’ve always been.