deepundergroundpoetry.com
Nix
I was technically never born. My mother was
too small a person to push me out like most
newborns, so they stuck her with paralysis and
splayed open her stomach. She told me she had
never been so scared in her life, the
doctor pulling me from her guts like an
impaction because no amount of drugs or
fitted screaming could get me to pass like
normal. The Wikipedia page for birth describes
human genesis as being the act of pushing a
baby out through the birth canal, so where exactly
does that leave me? A calcium oxalated knot that
eventually needs surgical attention after weeks of
pain and bleeding and swearing that you'll never
deprive yourself of what you used to take for
granted ever again? I'm not made of
minerals, but I have to be. The world is
full of strangers spitting arrowheads down
range at a moving target nineteen years of age,
male but the bullseye only hovering a few
inches over five feet off the ground, trying to
pack down enough food everyday to get the scale in
his bathroom to read triple digits so that he
can finally grow out of his aging black clothes and
grow into the half a head of hair draping over the
right side of his face. Yes, people have the right to
their own opinions, but if yours is pointed and
the edges are sharp enough to splay open skin at
the very touch, please do me a favor and fucking
swallow it. Let your serrated thoughts tumble like
bits of broken glass down into your stomach, making
little openings as it falls, making it sore and anxious,
making it nearly impossible for you to eat the
portions of food any average person could take in.
Let it pass through you, not for days or weeks or
months but a fucking lifetime of panic and suffering and
bleeding that you can't see from the outside, and
when it passes can you then sling your calcified bull-
shit. Don't let it cut you on its way out.
Published 6th Mar 2015
| Edited 7th Mar 2015
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7th Mar 2015 4:32am
13th Mar 2015 00:34am
This is so candid and haunting. I wished you hadn't had to experience what you've been through. But you've written so beautifully about it. At 19 you are an extremely impressive craftsman with words. I'm reminded of my own daughter, whose umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck and was choking to death, and they threw me on a table and gutted me like a fish. It was the oddest feeling. But when I heard her cry, there had been nothing more right in my whole existence. I bet your mother loves you so much. I don't know if I took this poem the right way, but I just really like it.
13th Mar 2015 1:34am
Thank you so much for the endearing words, Toni, I cannot even imagine the kind of horror that must have put you through, both for your daughter and yourself. My mother is a saint for dealing with all of my mental quirks; I write to try to ease them and, in turn, bring ease to her.
