Coming to Birth, and: The Pill on the Carpet

Coming to Birth

"We have only one intention...
to know the self before birth."

- Sotoba Komachi

I imagine those above us
still in a garden, gauzy
mist softening their sight.
They wrap themselves in flimsy,
see-through bodies, tender,
though they finger secret lumps
starting in curves or folds
and wonder what the other spirits hide.

They want to push, jostle into existence
those incipient wads
of pain, but fleshless blows
glance off like balloons
that children swat.
And so the souls look down,
off their perfect plateau, to see
us, fighting and exposed.

Jealous, they line up for secrecy
and skin. They're after liver
and spleen where angers can condense,
muscles to striate with remorse.
But they're stunned by the watery schuss,
the birth canal, the spill
into flesh so dense and tight.
The world swims up fuzzy
in their eyes. Flailing
their new arms, they know only
to fear another fall. Isn't this
how we all come - the infant's body
reconfiguring anger in desire?
We want to be blanketed, bound,
to turn our faces
to the delicious breast.

The Pill on the Carpet

I pick it up outside the restroom door,
neon yellow and electric
green, a capsule-sized clue
to someone's private life. I'm guessing
one of the company hot tickets lost it,
her lipstick luscious lilac,
the shade of the femme fatale
on her way to the top.

Except for this small secret: Hives?
Psoriasis? An eye that locks
in an uncontrollable tic?
Does the drug edit her home movie
to Disney instead of Hitchcock? Fire up
her thyroid? Ice down a burning in her gut?
Or is this pill the last in a trail
she drops to find her way
out of the building, back to her car?
I'm waiting in the restroom
for a Dior-stockinged leg, that kick
of panic as she meets the door.
I'll throw my pills at her feet, cry,
"Look how we both suffer.
Let's hit the juice bar to compensate
for the woe that is in life."