What Babies Really Do after Bernadette Mayer

Meconium, a splash of darkness on the
Rocks, a frail hiccup of astounding courage
Repeated and defeated the late breakfast
And early midnight

The ghost cloud goo dripping into
Polyester pants with cotton linings
like
b read lines during the great

Depression and melancholia after
Two dried cracker s in the earliest morn
Heaving and heaving like orgasm on a good day
But it is in the throat and choking, choking.

I have eaten Milan and swallowed the Congo
This growing thing with palpable flesh wailing seas
Wailing in silences, floating into and kicking, raising the
Knee across the belly stretched Djembe Djembe-

Late days in throbs if on the back, throbs if
On the feet, throbs and leaks the leaky goo of plugs
Water and wailing walls and the wall of transition
Which is nothing like puberty or the ease of adolescence

Hate, hating everyone and the inescapable train of
Push, no wait, push and feel the thin lip splitting into splitting
Into hot poker pain of elbows flared into knees and shoulder blades
Breaking through the pelvis that was once a gift

Opened and reopened, inserted and reinserted with
Deftness of what babies really do when they are calling
from the other side to become seed. Not choosy goo, but
Solid like absolution and suffering. Suffering.

Fat butterball of turkey plucked and wailing with cranium-
Unfolding that shows meconium was the answer of hiccup
Defeated at 2:AM, now wailing into wee exhaustion little
Cowbird of future teenager flesh.

The secret is the toilet training, shit and stool, stain and sac
Rifice time and tooth-brushing miracles of naps especially if there are
Brothers profoundly screaming and competing with the new
cowbird butterball snot producing meconium stained head hungry hiccup

On a good day, day care and moments of sleep and caffeine alternating like
Breath between waves of narcolepsy and a penchant for skin cancer of which
Must now swathe the child in 54 PABA-free slather, before projectile vomit, spit up
On every clean blouse without milk stains of the perfect food of which another

Will attempt to drink now that we are dairy queen s.
Make butter and spread it on breasts going south for the winter
Cold, cold, isolating cold, the chill divide down the middle of the mad bed
Who seeded and has not sod the green gift , hot poker- again.

Knocking in the night of dreams swimming in blood screaming in
Blood, screaming darkness filled my lungs and I was alone hearing you
But couldn’t see you or break free. Hush child someday you will be a man but
First there is earwax to wrangle, reading and Dr. Seuss’ One fish, Two fish, Red fish

Blue Fish swimming in Cat in Hat play with the child with moose horns and duck feet
Unsatisfied by mere boyness, the lost child of Neverland reaching back
Craning forward, lost in a sea of report card measurement, checkmate and
Somber blues seeping into the tulle fog morning fashion. He is

Suicidal but passes on the destruction because he hasn’t seen the ending. Mother now in the closet with the 38 special in her mouth dreaming of silence with the
Bang that once blew her mind and now to blow her head, but he is calling
And needs toilet paper for his ass or prank or nose or earwax or , but

The gun has to go—too much to do with hot wheels and super racetracks criss
Crossing into the far future. Before the man with the financial plan to save your hard working dogs. He needs grapes and an inhaler, she needs glasses and help with her autism, which is actually algebra trying to become poetry of signs.

Wrong, wrong to bring that here. Wrong to take the puppy if nobody can play with it. No body can walk it like it deserves, quadrupeds of hair and shit, earwax and projectile vomit
Never needing the college education or a slap between sniveling rivalries, the black beanie baby was always his best friend before he started girls and breast staring-

Offered to show mine to see if they were as wanted as before, not taken, that offer, rather
Drink meconium from sheep uteruses than touch narcoleptic bitches laughing in the corner to friends. Those loyalists that remember the petite 5, firm ass, naiveté, and the hunger, the god damn hunger of no sleep nights.

What babies really do in hendecasyllables is trill the mewonk in tillables, not like Cage and Westlightenment, but even more chance equations. Her ice cream melted, its eyes watching her mouth, its cone a discovery in obelisk essence, one gum ball pushing, one snap and the lightning-bugs abdomen can be worn like a ring, Robert, all over the city

discovering, uncovering, cowering in cold without sheets. The man couldn’t stay hard and it wasn’t me, wasn’t the rosebud lips aflame like matches scorching the underbelly of vast inadequacy. This is secret, yes, and painful like air forced in when death is more appealing, like being sewn up in the belly button after the laparoscopy without

anesthesia. Kick, kick like birth, kick into the underbelly moist and slapped together like fish. Wrap in newspaper, the fish, the one eyed head stare, the park bench like gondolas at fisherman’s wharf. Fish like the clocks on my pajamas lost in Bologna after the thugs shystered me. It was cold and I have no pajamas, no pants, left there under paper still a

bra for the warmth, and me now worrying about the world of shrubs and poppies, and the strong arm of terrorist politics, legs. Arm wrestle for it god damn it. Impregnate one another and have coffee together to discuss the fucking birth plans, …that ought to bring peace. Shoot flies instead of pubescent hard-bodied boys,

so silly in need of using their plump equipment. I want to be a cowboy. Ride the electric pony singing yippie-ya-yeah. Yippie Yih Yeah, I survived the attack and still have fingers! Just the rocking motion now, like the moments after, fear. I can leave my body faster than you can say vagina. Leave like Rome and Sirmione, think of Catalus

The wergild of Adelchi. The monastery, the Gregorian chants wailing like birth.
She was beautiful, rosebud colored cupid lips, and arrows from the deep brown eyes. They cut her out of me then laid her on my fresh cut fish belly. Hearing, not seeing, I was pan to egg, a paper to swaddle the eye of her. They rolled her away, unable to lift

my head, move arms, flail like fish, I cried. Cried like Superman must have cried, propped in his electric corset. In recovery they promised to let me see her tomorrow, where I might see the rosebud lips that grew inside me, the fingers uncounted, the unaccounted for. Where I promised to wail after the counting to ten if they did not bring

her NOW. It was not me. Shouting and demanding, but the me SHE turned me into, the me after the man, the grass and the left cold harboring spume. The me that later had the boy— the me that labored for 54 hours at home to birth without the chance of being flayed like fish. When it was ready, I put on lipstick to look fresh for his arrival, this

chance. Two hours of pushing butterball baby of heft, tear and silence. It was too secret to let out a sound, that boy, my edelweiss, my buttercup. He could speak at two weeks- whisper and question like a man-child. The doctor said it couldn’t be, but there he was forming mama , ma, moma and movement. Then me that labored again at home, ready

with water gushing a Trevi fountain, an hour for the last, one push, popped like a silent pumpkinseed, head shaped from the journey, then smiles, sleep and deep hunger. What they do is stare. In the room the crib slept, waiting like a mountain cave. She is me, small wonder, lanky like pole beans, snappy like peas.

What they do is demand a mortgage. The way of welfare leads to the way of a job, which breaks its teeth on minimum wage and gun control, reduced wages and sky rocketing healthcare. You are nothing outside of Spain or England or Canada without the HMO and the DMV, the unemployment development harvesting you like chickens.

You will go willingly then to inject the Euthabarb into the veins of cats, into the hearts of recalcitrant dogs that do not die after the first injection. You will clean blood, vomit and parvovirus diarrhea to buy a receiving blanket, a crib sheet and a bonnet. You will stop eating and start farming beans, corn and tomatoes to eat with the lentils on sale. You

will search cushions for coins, celebrate the day cans add up to enough money to buy a beer. You will sweep the kitchen floor, hate the linoleum, hate the formica that is not Italian marble. You will say blackberry, but not because it is embalmed, but because you remember that it was once in your mouth and isn’t now-

When you are forty, if you had all that and still survived, you will think that it was nothing, that they are beautiful! Shake the pom-poms; do the splits! The stretch marks that once grooved your belly like sandstorms will become silvery like the silver of sardines swimming to vast unknown equations.

JL