Biographics I

In labour

A child cried out

“Stop – stop speaking.

Stop shouting;

Stop asking me who I am.

Can’t you see, feel, hear

I am busy being born?

I am busy tearing my mother.

My mother is busy being torn.

I am splitting her flesh:

She will have to be sewn up

Like a botched sockhole.

She is squeezing me out of her narrow aperture,

Squeezing me like a toothpaste ribbon out of her.

Oh my ribbon-shaped head!

Oh her dented pelvis!

Is it any wonder that after this

We want only to listen to each other?

Silence please spectators,

Your blurred faces are of no more interest

To either of us.

We are alone in a crowd of open eyes

And faraway klip-klap, trip-trap tongues talking.

I shriek at her touch:

She dribbles drugged tears on my neck.

Lullay, lullay cry out the nurses.

I hear them singing like a chorus

Applauding at a distance.

I hear them singing as they tie cords

And dispose of placentas.

Is it for this I slid howling from the hole?

To see and despise? She to worship

And find me a great hefty lump,

A burden all day long, all life long?

Lullay, lullay she caresses my wet black hair,

Watching the impression of her labour disappear

From my head, from my face. How long before

She hates me because my birthmarks are eroded

To shadows of scars?

After a few years of asking her

Why she didn’t love me enough not to have me,

I will grow old enough to stretch girls

In the mud and the cinders. Then am I free of her?”

•

When I went away she left, and wherever she is

She’s not thinking of me now.