The serpent

I know what they think of you

I know all the synonyms they associate with your very being:

The birth of evil, the birth of temptation

They very reason there are sinister entities in world, the universe even.

Encouraged to kill you like all the other parts of us we are told are macabre.

I do not kill you.

I feel your presence inside me, at war with whatever is it that clutches to my body and soul,

the unwanted.

Your most valuable virtue, patience.

I feel you constrict this darkness with your powerful coils, wrapping yourself around it until

the life that is sucked and stole away from me is returned to my body.

The perfect cycle.

I know how you saved me, saved me with your power of transmutation.

As you shed your skin from within my internal walls, I shed my own external skin.

And as it fell off like the feathers of a phoenix who has returned from war, and the new emerged

I am in complete devotion to your influence of rebirth.