Safe House

Q. How does a baby experience the world?
A. What is a baby?
Q. How do the dying experience the world?
A. Please do not ask me.

Caring for you looks like letting you stay
on the sofa as long as you need like feeding
you through a long intravenous tube like
imagining a structure that gets ‘made’ and
we have beneath and around us forever.

There is no nationalism inside the baby, no
thing outside its own endless perimeter. This
baby as you can see by the way it is and will be
inside the world and inside me is every part of the
interesting logic of Ifeedonyouyouareyouareyoume.

The baby is a structure that will never fully convince
me, like a rubber teat and a purchase order, and yet
against all anti-baby structures I will anoint myself
as some inverted monarchy, absorb their many hostile
architectures into my own unproductive body.

The shape of the ward is different when you visit
but when you stay it’s entirely circular. There are beds
where the windows would be, and windows where
the exits are, but you stay a while here thinking about
all of your friends and their new charges in the dark.

It is the context that changes the gentle clamp of
needle into vein from a trespass to a fleet of older
rests now wild returning. Hands and the limbs
that hold them and your earnest wish for another
memory of knobbling bone and the cool press

of something earlier, that knows when the time comes
to really leave. The baby is still there, at times like
these. Dote on me! I demand, red-faced, from inside
my own recollections of majesty. Sorry my love, the
baby says to everybody else, I really had to be—