Damaged Fruit

Childhood is a skin you can’t shed.
I saw my own birth.
The doctor in the house cut the umbilical.
The aroma of antiseptic baptized me and I tasted
blood disguised as amniotic fluid. The scalpel tore
me away like a tumor as he said, “It’s kind
of like a boy.” The nurse
blushed, thinking she saw him say something
funny, but
he was just misquoting Richard Hugo, hearing him
give a remarkable reading
at the University of Colorado
Denver
despite being dead.
Come to think of it, It must have been
Boulder, instead.
That’s where
poetry lives
and every writer has a bike.
Some mountains look nice enough to die on
and you know how those Rocksniffers are, always
making us late with their infernal whispering:
I’ll make it fit if it’s the last thing I do.
The rabid squirrels of desire
took our oversized nuts away.
The morning sun left us shivering
so we turned inside out
so bad
even Foxy became all tangled up in intestines
and he’ll have to call the doctor back
from the nineteenth hole.
“Fetch me a ripe caddie,” he says.
“He needs to find my balls
and show me how to grip my club.”
He knows ways of searching he can’t remember.
Ce'est la vie?
Nien! Ich werde jenen Fehler nicht wieder machen
Low hanging clouds applauded our arrival,
marveling at our performance:
claws out, we dug into our skin,
searching for that oh so tasty
hidden morsel.