Hey hey wet butts, got a bit of a backlog of poetry to get through while I try and find four damn minutes of writing time so I can make new thing. This is a little something something about dad hood and back pain.
I try not to complain about dadding with various success. Truth is I love it and have some serious stockholm binness going on. Like i gone so bonkers ima miss changing nappies, miss rocking the kid till me arms go numb, miss the burps and vomits and shits that aren’t gonna be my business anymore in the rapidly encroaching future.
I think there’s something in appreciating the hard stuff, something that dadding brought out in me that was always there. Dragging myself over the finish line was always more satisfying than speeding ahead. It’s a kind of wholesome masochism, knowing you really slogged for something. And if it goes unremembered or unappreciated I know I will appreciate it, which is good cos I’m the one that’s gotta live with me.
Anyway good talk, got me back onside after the kid pulled my hair in a very appreciative blind rage. Here poem.
Cenobite
I am a tooth with a chisel splitting its middle. I
am a fingernail with a needle squeezing its way under. I
am a papercut in the webs of fingers and the corners of lips.
Primordial darkness, black as before and after
until my eyes adjust and a blade of light slits the crack
between the carpet and the bedroom door. My
spine twisted, voluntary
involuntary scoliosis.
My right arm jammed out at an awkward
angle,
a broken limb on a storm thrashed tree.
My wrist excruciatingly stuck under
a toddler in a dinosaur onesie.
Between the bars of his wooden cot
my palm upturned, with the full
weight of my torturer pressed upon it,
a chubby shadow in the gloom.
My torturer melodies discordant dribble
of machinery and monsters
until his attention wavers.
I count away the pain, ten,
fifty,
five hundred, then
silently slip from the rack
and tiptoe
to the jammy door, wincing at the sound, the most painful
part yet, and as I push it closed
I miss his weight already
Skydekkerix 