Five Months I carried you in that
Awkward Space.
Some metaphysical wonderland below my navel but
Close to my narrow backside.
For Five months I watched you grow,
Felt your insomniac tug at 4a.m.
While sweet daddy snored

And it is true
It was just you and me—
Me a mad talking, talking madwoman
And my unborn mate
Plotting together you and I,
At 4.a.m
The fate that somehow I knew you’d
Grow to fit like a glove
The way your daddy fit inside me
Like an old run-down lock stuck on a brand new key.

Good God the things I know you know:
The songs; words; unspoken thoughts; fears and the dreams
Me and my kin hurled like cursed blessings
In the sacred dimensions of that space.
And in those moments you did not move,
But lay like a floating golf ball
That would not even budge for Mother’s calls.

Oh, little Atlas how you bore it all,
The anger over the bad timing…the…
Still, the comforting reassurances from Mother’s side—
Their hoaky talk
Of now having a boy to spoil
And watch grow,
A pied piper waiting to be stolen
From my arms.

What was it little one—
I mean, the cause?
Was it your mother’s glow hovering like a relentless sun
That seared and singed, and singed
The membrane-soft arteries of your little rat’s heart

Perhaps you came to say: “Mama Dear, your time has come.”
And rather than wait for death to randomly pick at me
Like an aged flea
You will choose the glorious day
And turn that cherry-red Wonderland
Into a house of decay—
Our private Wasteland
Where you and I can play.

Four days now
You’ve been lost
To me in this tomb.

Your are not a harvest,
But a rotten grape
That grew into an orange
And now, a smoldering yellow pus of
Decaying potato.

I believe they know that space has now become a tomb,
Little one.
They smell your rot on my breath,
See sags and rocky lumps in my
Fomenting belly.
I feel you dissolving; feel your
Fever rising to my throat.
You poison my blood.
You shorten my time.

Good God, the things you know you know—
And the illusions you bleed all over with your tiny rat’s heart.
You heard the lies they told
About the joy and wonder of:
Forthcoming Life.
Your flesh eats mine now.
You hasten a demise you would have started
The moment your first serenaded us all,
And then, a second cry to declare: “This is real.”
And: “I am here.”

The doctors and the white-washed nurses would have smiled.
And I can see Daddy—
You know the way he smiles that smile?
I can see it now,
Big enough to swallow you whole.
And all along you’ve sensed your mother’s fear.
And so, you decided to erase her despair.

Now, I can taste death because
Life inside me which had
Grown and grown
Is now gone, and, is no more.
It’s not so bad after all because
Death can’t cause sickness
Only Life.

So I will wait, my potato mush
Until they are gone,
Daddy, Auntie Rae and Grandma Joe
To the seaside fare
Where for a moment they can escape my poisonous fumes that
Strap them of air.
I will lie naked and cramped
And grab these two poles
That hold together the canopy where Daddy and I
Planned to grow old.

Come now.
And I will push and push—
Legs apart. Hands on the pole—
And push, and push and push
And then it will be over…this
Sickness of life
Push until it’s over and
You and I are no more.