this is how you lost me

Grand like a piano,
black mixed through white
–
–
–
and it did seem apt, since you are always the older mother in grey
in the only one where you smiled




and She holds her womb

absently

. Already distracted from that other mother

even before she has even arrived or gone



Do you even remember which eve it was?


Or was that clutch a premonition, did you know she would leave?
Are you feeling now the tube rip, the lips curl back, too far?
Do you carry the pain from always inside that eve?

Does eve bring it to us – that prior to knowing that we will always be
left

alone



Are we all cradling our before known loss, right there,
inbetween

the bone and skin, the seas and skies,

there in that city of dust

of rotting blood

beneath our toes as we run through the swamping on-pour

there where we always sink into reeking eternity and find ourselves lost

or found,

in the hot wet
steam of a rice-baby now grown, whose hair never did turn black.

Daughter of daughter that forever moves with the oceans
foaming out from nebulous splurges

to lie oil bathed on the shores of a stolen isle

always taken in the dead of night

Eve



arrives to a land so strange rude

Lay hoe!

round the back

a woman with a face of years
crouching stiff over needle and thread.

Whether it be skin or silk
you buy, you buybuy?

Missy missy with the china-girl eyes,
then skipping barefoot on the sun-bleached cement

this is how you lost me

when I found I wasn’t one of any of you

this is how you lost me