Motherless Children

I first tasted her lips at the bottom of the garden.
Slippery, apple-red lips,
and a thirsty, famished kiss,
like a swallow of water after a week in the desert.
A swollen, bee-sting of a kiss,
sprinkling pollen on the flowers, birds and bunnies.
A kiss that gave my pocket watch a seizure
and pointed it's hands at the moon.

And we rolled on the ground,
as naked and innocent
as the first glimmer of the rising sun.
The known world was our sandbox
and we built castles of stones, moss and mud.
Our gnarled, brown grandmothers
watched over us, their leafy fingers
cooling us with their shade,
and our father, the sky,
clothed us in woolly jumpers of blue
and teased us with beards of clouds.
like soap-suds in the bathtub.

Do you remember when your dewy head
was first peppered with love's golden crumbles?
You never doubted the morning-
the nourishment of sunlight
fed to your bones and blood.
The perfect adoration of your mother
was your birthright.
Your mother of the ten thousand things;
her hair of comets and constellations,
her cavernous belly full of diamonds and coal,
her rivers and oceans that kissed away
your scrapes and cuts.

And you were fearless with your gifts of love then.
Your heart was a bouncing birthday cake
and you showered jelly beans of affection
on all who crossed your path.
But whispered stories creeped about your ears-
promises of a better world,
and the clear stream of your joyful bounty
grew cloudy and stagnant.
Your mother's nurturing body became a bleak prison
and you wantonly pissed on her.
Thinking yourself bound for the glory train,
you smeared shit all over your lovely home
like a neurotic monkey,
only to wake up the next morning
hung over and face down in feces.

How easily we turn away from love
and become entangled in our own gibberish.
Like when those sharp, slavering fangs
sprouted from her sugar-fairy lips,
tearing my mouth from my face,
ripping out my throat,
and grinding my flesh to goulash.
And I in turn became the man who chewed up her head,
spitting out some fragments of bone and half an ear.
And there we sat, two senseless torsos
topped with raw hamburger meat,
lonesome, unspeaking, isolation tank Helen Kellers,
not knowing enough to pinch ourselves,
pull back the covers, and sit straight up in bed.

I know you think that love has left you
just a sad bit of gristle, a used wad of gum
stuck to the underside of the table.
But the sun is always hiding just 'round the horizon,
sniffing and snuffling his way
into your home town every day.
The skeletons of trees get new guts and skin
each and every spring.
The lake dries up over here
and the rain falls down over there.
And your mother is always forgiving
and awaiting your bruised and bloody-nosed return
with her celestial chicken soup.
So please don't spurn her because you've forgotten
that you were cooked up in her womb.
Please don't poison her body
with your noxious excretions.
And please don't piss in her mouth.
She's the only mother you've got.

David Aronson
February, 2006