Metempsychotic Diary: Watching My Baby Tapes

James Bowden

What did I want? What did I want?

                I’m being washed in the sink, the sink!,
                and I want to cry, I am so small and so so
                precious and I do nothing at all and but
                all anyone has for me is sweetness and kisses.

This is a very old story, and I have told it before.
I do not wish to tell it once more. Instead, a line:

                If distance could be a feeling…that’s what I felt.

My voice trails off.

We flash forward to present-day. He’s a forest of muscle:
the vines have overtaken him and now hold the hard shell
around his shoulders like a yoke. Vines to his face, too.
When he wishes to turn his head, the whole body must
come with it. A cow prod could not penetrate this fortress.
But he smiles as I kill him and disintegrate the muscle off
his back, finally, oh finally.

Come, come.

                I crunch crystals of sugar between my teeth.
                I pay attention to myself and realize (to my
                surprise!) that I can embrace everything that
                exists within me, everything that passes through
                me, even the even the                          emptiness.

And I’m not even sure that I understand myself.

                But each moment, I am born anew. I shift like the
                like the wind. I change my self, I change my life.
                I find reason to live all over again before throwing
                it away. The tension, the violence: all of it the very
                basest part of me. And I savor it, this change, it is
                me and it is not, and I eat that shit for breakfast.

Perhaps understanding is control.

                Perhaps love is listening despite the impossibility of
                fully bridging. Because of? Despite knowing not what
                will proceed hence. A definition, finally, of faith and trust:
                not just my shaky muscles propping up the world,
                whole.

In my dreams, the father is largely absent and I take the baby from his mother’s arms, and rock him, rock him ever so carefully, I rock him, I keep rocking him, the dream never ends, I simply fall asleep.

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A number of inspirations (as with all my best (favorite?) work, I think): Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment”, Mary Ruefle’s “On Beginnings”, a beautiful line from Maggie that I later made into this ounce of a poem, this kinda shitty Netflix anime show I watched called “YuYu Hakusho”.