Release Me
From This Hollow Womb

 

I guess you could say
That something "greater"
Aborted me inside the earth's
Hollow womb

I begin to wonder
If it was in the fifth year
Of the pregnancy

It was in that year
Sealed in impenetrable cellophane
That I fell off the merry-go-round
And spent the rest
Of my years in exile

Exiled on earth
The womb now a pale desert
The abortion doctor
Lifts his scapula
and begins to scrape
The fetus

The amniotic waste
Of the sun comes streaming
Down the earth's
Barren legs
The soul begins to
Discover the day
Before the night intervenes
And blunts its entrance
Into the greater world
With the cold steel
Of a surgical knife

And fragments of the void
Seep through fissures
Of an incision
Cut so deep
That memory cannot
Serve as a suture

The horizon barely
Seems visible now
The soil has overwhelmed
The sky

Now all that remains
Is a simple artifact
Of the soul
A stark monument
Composed of gypsum and marble
Which will, as
Centuries come passing through,
Erode and wither away
                          —Jason Cant

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