Confessions of a Baby Snatcher
This is my last confession; there will be no more.
I am impercipient and slow from last night's sleeping pill,
wincing away from the harshness of day.
Kitchen cold, the room tear-splintered,
sunlight striking a watery rainbow in my eyes,
air smothering-stale from my hopeless coffee cup crying,
whilst life outside the window ticks on relentlessly.
Seconds turn into minutes turn into hours...
When you plashed your pearlescence over my pale skin
I never guessed the inner ugliness of those seascape pearls
encircling each ovary, stubbornly adhesive, leeching new life.
The scanner's screen sizzling static, darkening to nightshade depth,
its impersonal probe trailing damp viscosity over my belly,
shockingly sticky as the first time you came on me
but lacking the warmth.
Puppeted by pity, you brought me pink carnations,
crushed their bright, baby-frail faces into a tacky hospital vase.
I am weighted with a multitude of baby-frail faces.
Indifference cold-eyed me at the hospital: histrionic, hysterical,
a blubbing huddle of neuroses,
collocation of surgical steel and wonder drugs.
Drugs to inflate the ovaries with a Botox bloat.
Drugs to wipe clean the scribbled slate of the mind.
You left me to weep amongst white hospital sheets,
coffin-cold, my hands folded on emptiness,
a paint palette of blood inks seeping from me.
Brushed by the soft wing of silence, what was being concealed?
The products of conception, screened from view?
The unseen dead, faceless and nameless,
trundling on trolleys through sterile corridors
to the eager heat blast of the incinerator - their crematorium.
They said I could try again
but barrenness occupies my bed;
it is a womb-burrower, fattening stealthily on menstrual blood.
The claw of infertility is clamped on my shoulder,
torturous flesh-hooks digging at my skin.
I ache all day from blanched almond ovaries;
fragile finger-fronds stilled to nothingness...
I find myself miraculously in the shopping mall;
my feet have no memory of the pavement that brought me here.
Fruit machines flicker and wince like migraine.
I circle the shop floor, keeping a safe distance.
I am not dangerous. I am not predatory.
I only seek to protect the meek,
to shield them from the vodka bottle,
the beatings, the needle in the arm.
Beneath the strip light's dizzying glare,
tenderly fingering bootees soft as puppies, mittens like kittens,
the meek sweet sleep smell pulling me in.
My purchases earn me a benevolent smile
from pretty Pollyanna at the cash till.
The bouquets of faces at school gate gatherings -
faces daffodil-bright, sunstruck and open with joy;
the happy heaving hordes.
I am not dangerous. I am not predatory.
I only yearn to merge with the scenery of domesticity,
immersing myself in routine and normality.
Noticing individuality,
the way it blossoms in every pram,
hazed by the human differences.
Vertiginous spinning of kaleidoscope and rainbow;
the park a synaesthetic playground:
blood bursts of poppy, fire flames of freesia.
My audible emptiness clattering; a hollow pod rattling
amongst bud bursts of green, fruiting trees, flowers heavy with pollen.
A sickly size six drifting diaphanously;
the scenery of pregnancy swelling around me.
Encircled by circularity: round bellies, round faces,
roundabouts spinning, globular beach balls and balloons,
blossom spheres shaken from trees shivering to the ground...
Awake again last night in smothering, starless dark,
that tiny bloodied form beating like a trapped butterfly inside my head,
face pressed into a tear-damp pillow,
recalling the bathroom's midnight chill
as I knelt in raw ruby carnage on the floor.
This is my last confession; there will be no more.
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