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96 Baby Sometimes it’s me on top of a woman, the lights mercifully dim, hiding something proving I’m slipping fast, ass-first, in the mudslide downward to middle-age. My hand blind in her blond hair, her ear almost in my mouth when I sluice two syllables into her: baby, beaten in time with my staccato pulse. Sometimes it’s me working vernacular popular before I was born: this mortgage is killing me, baby. Next, I’ll be calling men cats because, well, it just, like, sounds groovy, baby. Sometimes it’s me hearing my girlfriend deliver the one-two combination of what she needs from me to become whole: babies. I know it best as me, the only child, the baby, always. I know it when I’m supposed to be a man doing things men do: a valve job, dry wall work, underwater welding, a good hunter-gatherer, but before starting these jobs, I feel what I am unrolling up my spine like a father’s belt on my lilly-white back: baby. ...

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