Parturition

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being Locate an irritation without It is within Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical with the extensity Of intension I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait painter Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or —” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception Brute Why? The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running upstairs I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces In lascivious revelation Relaxation Negation of myself as a unit Vacuum interlude I should have been emptied of life Giving life For consciousness in crises races Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes Have I not Somewhere Scrutinized A dead white feathered moth Laying eggs? A moment Being realization Can Vitalized by cosmic initiation Furnish an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of unpredicted Maternity Against my thigh Tough of infinitesimal motion Scarcely perceptible Undulation Warmth moisture Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was—is—ever—shall—be Of cosmic reproductivity Rises from the subconscious Impression of a cat With blind kittens Among her legs Same undulating life-stir I am that cat Rises from the sub-conscious Impression of small animal carcass Covered with blue bottles—Epicurean— And through the insects Waves that same undulation of living Death Life I am knowing All about Unfolding The next morning Each woman-of-the-people Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet Doing hushed service Each woman-of-the-people Wearing a halo A ludicrous little halo Of which she is sublimely unaware I once heard in a church—Man and woman God made them— Thank God.