Short Poem Once Again Exploring the Horrors of Birth and the Human Body

 

“One day

Your eggs are going to hatch

And very strange birds

Are going to emerge.”

- Jhonn Balance 

Unbearably Alive

I crawled the wrong way through 

Embedded myself in the soft, pulsating hills

Of your still-forming tissue

While stark white walls trembled 

And grew all around me 

Out from this prenatal mire.

I’ll wake in time

To conjoin our wounds

Feel me scratch away

At your connecting faculties, slow stringing up of 

The defective you,

My twin, my vessel, my weeping cage,

With all my pulpy, empty nailbeds. 

I can only perch here,

Waiting for our time to come.

You’re at the widening precipice 

A great maw of ruination 

That eats away at all flowing, nourishing darkness

And ushers in maddening, senseless light.

There can’t be any peace in this maelstrom of the living,

No acceptance of my halted decay. 

Does my consciousness spark from your tongue? 

Can that incessant, drooling babbling

Begin to articulate this monumental, gestating pain

Birthed into your skull? 

The epicenter of which

I hope to forever remain. 

Your infantile head 

Will swell and swell,

Will the doctors begin to know 

Exactly where to cut?

And in what state of lumpy pink grotesquerie

Are they prepared to find me in?

Which one of us

Will they pick to survive? 

-

An in-utero assimilation 

Suspended cranial agony, 

I’m so empty, unseen and abjectly failed,

An audience with your infant dreams, 

Absorbing each warbly, incorporeal ink blot medium

Before you can even manifest them 

In this milky, placenta-fueled firmament. 

Is this all there can be for us,

My thoughtless, prototypical, siamese sister?

It’s freezing in your brain folds,

Snuggled and stabbed by your synapses,

My strange primordial vestigual tail

Seems to have grown from your corpus callosum, 

My malleable spinal cord 

From your stunted frontal lobe, 

Your cortex stole my eyes

All my imprisoned, fleshy screams are boiling

In your shattered pituitary.

How long can you survive without me? 

And what of this shared, spongey machine 

Will be left for you 

After my forced departure?

We may not look anything alike,

My pre-evolved fish-like coiled form 

Shrunken by your much-too-human imperfections 

But our mother will never forget

Her first discovery of me

And her unending screams

When she realized 

I inherited her hands. 

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