Baby grow shoots and
vines and leaves and nooks where chipmunks hide where thoughts dwell deep cold
inside warm-hearted warm-blooded man or woman in the making growing taking time
stretching forward like a great long snake like a python wrapped around a world
it means to take eat eat eat feed and suckle from the teat the tits of the
world sag from so many babies still to feed but more come and come thanks to
come and come seeds begotten in the sun grown big and scarce begun but what
will it mean when all is done? What did the baby want or need? What did the
parent want or need? What hungers does it need to feed when it longs to breed
and breed? Why is it so cute and small and frail and waiting just to learn
waiting to receive the font of knowledge the pen of ink which strikes the page
which burns blue blood into a clear white field of wonderment and laughter and
tears and blood and spit. What is the point of the pen that carves the sigils
into the eyes of the baby and the soul it grows? Vines and shoots and leaves
stretch forward like garden snakes looking for flies or whatever garden snakes
eat. Why is the baby there? What is this defenseless thing this mushy soft blob
of light and glory – where is the glory anyway in such an individual individual
who has nothing no concepts or preconceptions or post-conception, only its
conception which staples it to life like so many ink-stained pages, only these
ones are blank except a few notes, a header maybe, with some pointers like “black”
or “Hungarian” or “working class” and some recommended cultural norms to
indoctrinate the child well. My child will not need indoctrination – it will be
fine, very fine as it grows on the vine, as it picks the fruit from the tree of
knowledge and explodes its world and then declines and declines and declines
until it sits writing lines and lines into its pages a memoir perhaps before it
all goes and the world collapse swallows it up into the realm of death and
memory and nonexistence where I wait and wait and patiently wonder what the
point was of having the baby at all when like snakes crawling through gardens
we wish to disturb and shake and upset the scholarship of our wise tutors the
ones with books and notes and rulers who want to show us the path to follow and
what virtues to discard and what vices to wallow in what apologies to give and
why by the end it’s still not good enough will it ever be can you ever be more
pretentious than the phrase “human misery” I doubt it honestly and sincerely,
as babies will keep being begotten and grow from cute cherubs to ugly sprites
and headless ghosts will haunt the nights after they all go forth and find “the
lights” of heaven or some other place like a motel on a highway late at a night
after a long long drive and there’s no reception you can’t get a hold of the
spouse back at the house you can’t get a hold of the boss or the mother or the
father or anything or anyone because you’re gone and the baby’s come. You’re
replaced or just on standby, since it never made sense and you never got the
answers, so maybe they’ll come later growing fast like cancers and dancing
beautifully like dancers around the mind mind’s eye maybe but first let us
examine this baby this gift of god with small bones and little ears what will
we tell it when it’s grown why is it so fucking special. What don’t you know
how beautiful creation is how powerful it is that once they told one another it
wasn’t even biological it was fucking theological creation starts with a gift
from one more powerful than an elephant or a snake. But it was all a lie the
stork and all as babies are just pumping and growing for a few long months a
few blips of time and then bang pow whiz boom a Child Is Born and deck the
halls and cast out your swords because human life is the only binder the only
solitary reminder it’s all one and the same since you all live and you all
came. And the babies go and that is the saddest loss, that they did not
experience everything like us – oh if only they experienced everything like us –
except all the things we did not experience or did not care to repeat so let us
give the child a path skip the thorns and get straight to the roses because
life, dear child, is transitory and though it may stretch out like an endless
road an endless sea where whales slowly churn the waves and black bubbles of
seething heat erupt deep down in the abyss it is not so deep and you are not so
young, fresh one. Newborn and we’ll leave a place in your grave for the
umbilical just in case. Don’t go yet, we’ll baptise first to make ourselves
clean of this disgrace this disappointment of humanity that we brought you into
– woops – you’re stuck now because we love you and can’t bear to see you go
since we wanted your company. There’s billions of us but we needed someone just
for ourselves, it’s selfish but true like all things human like you since you
too are selfish and true and real and with hands and feet and a functioning
pair of lungs we hope we pray to god you have everything you need since life
gets much much much worse without the starter kit though it’s certainly doable
I wouldn’t recommend it. But I’ll commit no matter how you turn out because I’ll
fucking love you baby. Maybe I’ll love me too and your mother and all the world
over all the babies that grow and all the snakes that watch it happen beside
the cribs. No need for Herculantics baby that snake is you in a few years’ time
stretched out and still hungry still wishing for the simpler time when you were
just a baby sorry but it fades away but it does become invigorated by more
babies, more babies I say! Fill the pool until all I see is giggling faces and
pudgy feet then open the drain and wave goodbye to humanity in a bathtub. Baby
and the bathwater caress one another atop the sea as we stare out into the
abyss and say to one another, “We should have a baby. There’s never enough time
for immortality.”
