Track One: Placenta Musing

The child’s foot is not yet aware it’s a foot,
And would like to be a butterfly or an apple
– Pablo Neruda, ‘To the Foot from its child’

i

This is how I came to be: a daytime dream:
Life begins as a hazy harmattan forenoon
It is trees wearing rusty leaves and twigs
It is a mother’s plea for nature to falter
But her desiccated desires are spurted
Into a citrus-sized head clambering out
Hollering to see what could hold it longer
Mother father midwife the bed or just stares?

ii

I form fanciful prose in chiselled clouds
Birth gives one a worth of six feet of stories
And the foundation of many-storey issues
Built on many plots of gender narratives
And Feuds of p/referred myths passed down
As an Other narrative to own or disown
Or torture dreams into rainbow colours
Wherefore I sum time, become daybreak

iii

How can I who do not know life know death?
To say one die when born is foolishness
I am a stranger wearing the sound of earth
I am a drifter, like plankton in salt water
Sometimes I will hear the wind say to me:
Child, welcome to the drama of the binary
I striate into the soul of rocks to be colours
Of rainbows and fauna and flora and being

iv

Here is a child with the wisdom spoken in markets
Songs carried in the eyes of the places I call mother
This one is a child of stories that lift off sills like dust
I was a story inspired by solitude of dusk
Now I am a gallery of daylight-inferences
What is not to expect from the life of one like mine
A birth prevised by scan and then revised by schemes
Only now finding identity in the fluidity of pronouns

(excerpt from a current manuscript 'the sun is no fool')