The Verb

The verb, to be

Is forcing me to betray my baby.

My baby, who, as I write these words,

Is still I-n-g. Ing.

The verb, to be

Shows the condition or existence of a subject.

My baby is the subject that refuses to be sublimated by my refusal of it.

My baby's existence is subject to my condition.

The condition of my baby's existence is subject

To my conditional love.

Not simple past, because at that point/this point

Baby was/is an aspect of the future.

Whose is is hingeing on my decision

My decision which, sorry to say, is already made

So, Baby's is is no longer the verb to be in the traditional sense

My mutilated baby's to be has been or will be deformed by my will

It is my possessiveness that keeps me from the claims that otherwise would be lain (or laid) at my feet, corpses of sins, traded for freedom that is really just time borrowed from baby to be.

It can't unexist so it Will have to take on some irregular form.

If I can't not destroy baby

I destroy its innocence

Creating a monster in the void.

What will fill the vacuum

When life is sucked out of me

But my own personal specter.

Forever stuck

Imbued with the haunting power of never-realized love.

And if I'm not careful

Baby might take on a life of its own

And how could I deny it life

A second time around?

I couldn't blame baby for exchanging

Its sepulchral throne

For an ascension to the future.

Which was baby in the womb's if not baby in the flesh's would be, rightful home.

Maybe I can let myself off easy,

Because baby will never be wounded,

Baby will never know pain,

But how can I know for certain

That baby won't ache

In the pit of its non-existence

That I inflicted.

No one but baby will bear witness

To the symphonies of doubt that lift

The emptiness

To a cacophony of "how? How? How?"

Could you do it?

And can you still do it now?

This is the torment that baby must suffer

In the hollow of my stomach

With bile for a buffer.

It can not hear no evil when it's swamped in its heart.

I wanted to be a better mother or a mother at all.

But I don't want it now and I can't say when I ever did

I can't undo you and here you are.

I can't give you life

But still we won't part

I see your ghost seated at the right hand of your father

Who seeded the ill-fated hatchling.

He was or would be

The daddy of my baby to be

But would be changed to would have been

When the baby became what was no longer an infinitive

But passive, passing, gone.

Irregular.

And I wish I knew more about grammar

About verbs and imperatives

To talk about the baby that almost was.

This baby is linked to me.

Linking me to the we that once was.

A part of me will be

Now and always

Stuck in the past.

I wish I could carry it with me,

But I have made that choice

Already.

And there is no going back.

Baby will never be an imperative,

Because it was not imperative to me that it ever be.

In the present.

I refused to accept it as the gift

It was maybe meant

To be.

Still none of this has affected me,

I'm swimming in counterfeit emotions,

Careful hot to touch

Still nothing burns.

Reflections of sensations.

Mockeries of creation,

My sang-froid has left me trapped inside of the mirror

Abandoned to a soulless lack of reality.