a Soul Coughing web site on the screen reflecting my eyes my hands clutching a poem in a book of Bob Kaufman my heart beating with the fetus in the room next door sleeping my brain stuck in theoretical circles of freeways and post-structuralism and MTV moves in time with the breathing walls and the stereo beat of wings and baby hiccups I have lost my vocabulary, slippery, it fell and formed a lyric it won't exit my head jumbled I claw to think a thought with no road map to forget all I've read and learned and taught and to leave circular thought and the linear and lineage, to go beyond slink behind polluted, the bass line plunks along in time to the heart baby swimming in the mother trapped by words formed symbols archetypes busting open in the hot December before the birth before the love.