"like the great queens of history .....she was born with the umbilical cord around her neck"**

 

My baby face seems to follow me everyday

i see her in the bathroom mirror in the mornings 

i see her in the reflection of my mobile screen on sleepless nights

she is a reoccurring illusion, my body was mourning the lose of her innocence

 

 

I see her big black galaxy eyes, that never close

not even a blink for she was afraid of losing, for that reason i mourn.

i  mourn thee death of a red faced snotty nose baby girl. 

i guess she was hungry for the tarty sensation from a teachers red apple 

hungry for that red apple that dangled before her just a centimeter out of reach

never did she blink, never to miss the possibility of something beautiful , for that reason i mourn

i mourn  all the teeth that fell out when she hit the ground, with her eyes wide open.

 

 

Little did she know, all other children blinked for reasons unknown to them

because the forces that turned her from mush to mass 

had already written a fine printed script.

For this reason every tiny blink was an intermission 

designed to make us forget the tiny glass deep within our palms

palms we create adjacent worlds with and recall our dreams we didn't know were rigged. 

 

She had no intermissions no.... but she had a subconscious destination to reach

a painful coming of age condition, she had to meet

so she refused, i refused to blink.

It exposed the inner working to her.

I stored it all like the trusty coin in the back pocket of my favourite jeans 

momma said she was strong, i was strong as my wild curly frizz hair 

that grew untamed like the memories that would flood her eyes

only to retreat back into the depths of her subconscious,

she thought they had disappeared.

 

Oh BABY GIRL! WHY DO YOU FOLLOW ME?
i have mourned you already..........

i see your face glistening in the dark murky water of the moat

i mourned all the eyelashes that fell the day you blinked

i see your dark pupils sit awkwardly in the disproportionate pool of white innocence

i mourned the day you sang of a boy on the grass of your backyard.

every so often your pupils dilate, until it is a steaming pool of thick black lava 

bubbles would emerge from its surface carrying warm pungent breaths

when the bubbled popped they whispered truths we had witnessed

POP!" reared you are" it said in a low raspy voice

POP! the scent of lemon, the under breath of a demon

It would sometimes torment me

POP! Blink or fall asleep while awake

for the raw truth can make your skin prickle

They never made the world for us to survive

But for the days my eyes never closed i gained what most

can't phantom , a sliver band around my neck

for she was like the great queens of history ..... she was born with the umbilical cord around her neck 

for i was like the great queens of history i was born with my eyes wide open

 

 

This poem is about the dilemma a young adult women has about her childhood,

She mourns the child she was, a child who was always inquisitive and eager to challenge what she saw; she refers to when she blinks as when she silenced herself and was reared into the path most they put women in her society.  She is disillusioned with her current state of being therefore her inner child haunts her.

** reference from a chronicle of a death foretold