What if I knew, now standing,
that I came crawling from
the sea, rocks shifting, all around
me the watery silken earth
parting to give me pass?
Could I have come crawling across
deserts of generations
before me, with the sun horribly
itself? Come crawling, like
a baby, all stumbly and drooled,
an amphibian magically
slipping its skin to reveal
the softness of an ingénue? Would
I have come forcefully
heaving up my own breath
to puncture the dark web of my throat?
All for what, to come to speak
these very words:
“Dear Mother” and “Dear Father?”
What could I do, now that I
was falling from family grace,
earth shifting down below
me, and the paling shallow sky
parting to give me pass?
Should I have said something different,
canceled my vague intentions
before I spoke, listening to the
gods above? Should I have
tried flying just to escape the odd
sensation of vertigo,
dropping my head to conceal
the eager tears of an innocent?
What could I demonstrate
of myself to the best
of this world—a darkness that is
not at all understandable?
Walking towards death,
falling, should I flail, holler?
All credos turned out to be
false. They moved away from
the desert, turned back
to the sea. They went retreating.
Philosophy abandoned me,
to regress and renurse at its
mother’s tit, earth’s core.
The rocks pounded and rolled
on the seabed. When they finally
slowed, the world’s first poet
came rising. He looked away when
he spoke—turned that salty, grave face
away from God and from me, toward
something—anything—else.
He said, When you are about to
speak, when you are about to lie,
do not let someone else
speak the truth, which is that
someone else always says it better.
After a long wait I realized
that I, too, was human. How else
to explain the hunger I had,
the sadness I know, and the silly
darkness that awaits me? So, I
practiced avoidance—panting
and busy, I ran around the city
shredding my hems. I met
people untrained in me, took jobs.
Some being inside me—mysterious and ghostly—
kept me propped up. But a man
without beliefs? Well I was getting
worldly experience! I suffered
the strain of internal pressures,
albeit only from within—and who else
could have told me what I was so
desperate to know? But what
struggles! What persistence! And still
I kept calling, “Mommy, Daddy!”