Ode to Mother

Muuuuurrrrmm,
I say it like March,
But stretched like the skin on her belly she canvassed me with.
Rolling R, like the rolling I did inside of her,
Breaking the insides of her,
Pushing the very fibre of her.
Nine months is a long time,
To live inside someone and not drink from their sap.
I find myself more of her loins than his,
Sorry Dad, the dice just rolled that way,
Or your seed couldn’t fight her current.
She must have been waiting all those years,
To prick the canvas of me with odes of poetry.
Burst water, into light, gushing streams penetrating sight,
I know, I was a bit of a fight.
But look at your fruit, you pruned me right.
She mustered her fetish for books,
In subconscious anticipation for her first son,
At nineteen, her first one,
Mum,
What have you done?
Thrown into the belly of the beast,
The beauty of you,
Me being the beast,
And your beauty, coursed through.
Endless verse and endless prose,
And you couldn’t resist giving me your nose.
So I wouldn’t forget where to look,
Bang smack between my eyes,
Always a reminder of you,
I like that narcissist touch,
Subtle, all the better to sniff out the leeches, put up my guard,
Hang on, that’s not you,
You’re heart is way to frail to be on guard from people,
That’s me, my heart even frailer,
So I protected it by learning how to fend off anyone,
With blinding fury if I needed to,
All the while, you begged me,
“Don’t hit anyone, please, I know your hands can be destruction”,
And every single damn time, in my ears your words rang true.
And even though I learned the fighting arts,
It was only for deflection.
Here I sit with a wall so high,
But contained, poised, and able to fly,
Words, carry my wings wherever they want to go,
The prayers of love over each meal you blow.
But with you, down come the gates,
Nourished nine months, still going at thirty eight.
Thanks for nearly forty years of seeing me,
But the way I like it, unspoken, softly, silently.
-W.E.