The Offline Mind

It’s a rainy day, but lately even the sunny ones feel grey. I am grey. I am seven months pregnant and struggling to hold focus. I want to sleep all the time. I have no appetite and yet a duty to eat. The food is tasteless. I drink endless glasses of water and my skin is still dry, my lips the braille of what I don’t say. I can’t write. Nothing good, anyway. I thought this summer would be different, I envisioned earth mother, rising goddess, long flowing locks cascading around swollen belly, inspiration to create life being synonymous and harmonious with an inspiration to create art. Yeah right. I am in the hoodies and baggie borrowed pants stage of pregnancy now where I can’t sleep, my hips hurt, my belly button grows bigger and more menacing by the day (the eye of Sauron, searching always for cocoa butter). I think of my past self as an almost sylphide, a spirit of air, light on her bicycle, light on her feet, light light light. White clothes. See through blouses. Hair so soft it slips from a clip like a sigh. My hair now? Crunchy. Can be put up for the day with a pen, single-handedly. It ain’t going nowhere. I miss feeling like I am PART of the poetry I create…my condition forces me to stand outside my work and create art completely without Self, without vanity (who could be vain at a time like this). I am in the great waiting room, me and my unnamed accomplice, who tosses back and forth in my womb like a cat in the bath. SOS. SOS.