This morning, I began writing mine,
but five hours and many legal pads later
I had gotten only as far as my conveyance
from the French Hospital to my parents’ apartment.
Of course, I could have devoted less time
to the bodily process of my birth,
the details of my wicker bassinet
as well as the many metallic animals
endlessly circling above me
as I lay supine, helpless and staring.
And so after a sandwich for lunch,
with so much work ahead of me,
including a catalogue raisonné of my toys
and a count of the tiles on the bathroom wall
behind which once resided my imaginary friend,
I decided to abandon the whole project
and maybe settle for a little essay
on the subject of the wallpaper or the taste of prunes.
Plus I already could hear
the voices of the vicious reviewers
happy to dwell on my shortcomings—
my love of personification
(my melancholic tricycle, for instance),
the limits of the first-person-selfish
point of view, not to mention
the overall lack of a clear theme.
And they would be right
about the pages and pages of senseless dialogue,
not to mention the tedium of chronological order,
even though that seems to be the way
my life has chosen to unfold itself, at least so far.