Dolphine
Aquamarine chink, another predawn start,
another day in a house
w/out adult education or my art.
A life w/out an internal life.
Sugar & screens, sugar & screens
screams Dolphine.
O unutterable folly
to fancy a morning
sans the psy-ops gavage,
3 hours of 'Ben & Holly'.
Next it's to the playground
w/ Dolphine in the doldrumming
mizzle, twice daily milling
about a mizzly dogshit island.
Tenderly I admonish her
not to mount the cuffwiped ladder
of the still treacherous climbingframe.
Cue today's 3rd tantrum,
this 1 ploughing a woodchip angel,
wriggling supine amid the beaver's muesli.
It does not amuse me
when she scatters a fistful of woodchips
backwards straight down her own pink shriekhole.
I carry my growing heavy lil' Calpol
Calpot home. Woodchip flecks
l/ spiders w/ their legs pulled off
bodyboarding out of her
tyrannical drool-grilled piercing pink
shriekhole. Awww,
my monotone soothes.
The woodchips & the dogshit,
the ravens & the daisies
of parks parents spend 1/2 their lives in.
But home is not so homely
at the moment, no sanctuary
from the selfaccusatory dereliction of duty
in a parent's resentment.
It's taboo as correcting a transgender
that the cuckoo's not in cupped areas, just in their
cupola; tacenda as decrying a LiKKKudnik
for a lying wolfcrying nogoodnik.
But less innocent than a baby
or the babyless, I'll say it:
toddlers are hell.
Yet to wish them gone or unbegotten is also
hell. To fail them, hell.
My jeans & tees are instantaneously
soiled by her food, her poop, her drool,
her playdough.I haven't kipt more than
5 hours a night or in the same bed as Dolphine's
mum for a good year (we're still together).
When my sugarrushing,
insolent dependent,
Generalissima Dolphine,
cherubic beast sleeps,
am I consoled
by a profound contentment
unknown to nonbreeders?
Or is it just respite
from a daily dissimulation
once unnecessary hence unimaginable,
but far, far more crucial
than the old juvenile game
of simply deceiving myself
or a senior figure at an institution?
Anybody get the number
of the bubba juggernaut,
pram jam in the hall of days?
Papa Panther paces
l/ helicopter aces
hoverhounding Othered khaki crazies.
Every Daddy-daughter day the 1st hour
of 'Kramer Vs. Kramer'.
Sylvia
must have been a genius to write
any poetry whatsoever
w/ 2 ankle vampires.
But she failed to master
Parenthood 101:
morbidity is strictly
verboten.
Dolphine, Dolphine,
the world's most beautiful animal
cub, your Daddy's not a bastard,
more of a snowflake greybeard dad, humbug
who loves you & wouldn't ever leave you
in the park. There's 1 set of footprints
in the woodchips to prove it.
When you've grown out of shulking out,
you're gonna have to watch out for the real bastards:
the men behind the sugar, the men behind the screens.