oh pregnancy oh pregnancy
oh how you make the belly grow
oh pregnancy, oh pregnancy
a girl if high, a boy if low

you give us gas and stretch marks
an aching back and fallen arch
oh pregnancy, oh pregnancy
oh please, oh please won't you have a heart

oh pregnancy oh pregnancy
oh how you make the belly large
oh pregnancy oh pregnancy
you make us feel just like a barge

you make us in the morning sick
and noon and night
what a ***** trick
oh pregnancy oh pregnancy
oh how - ouch - ooh how they kick

they kick and squirm
won't let you sleep
jab foot in rib and dig in deep
oh pregnancy oh pregnancy
why don't you go and take a leap

It rains
and I think of bales
of wet hay
crushing the wind
out of children
riderless ponies
with frayed rope
tied to the pommels
I find it hard to explain
eyeshadow and dead weight
tied to the other end
and girls who would like to
go on in this world
***** by their mother's
stepsons and husbands
the men and women
of learning have left us
so much, I prefer
to look at the moon.

You are fallen darkness,
the ghost ship
in the wake of a quarter-moon

Your depth
is like a blue grave
looking back
from a burial at sea

Your hands are shadows
over a campfire
lustering against the lightless
river, palms folding
like prayers over
the embering heat
of driftwood and deadfall
retreating into ash

You are heaven's shoal
of dead stars, the obsidian
lip of the shoreline
I approach without light

The shallow groundswell
of sand un-printing my tracks,
as if to refuse my sunless steps

You are streetlights left behind me
back home, softening now
beyond their dead-end streets.

I visualize you
who I will never know,
Constant Stranger
I call you, I imagine
you when I write
and to think, you
will never know me
like the few who
I am close to, those
who say: I don't
understand what you
are talking about,
but I know what you
mean...you know
there is no other poet
on earth like me
and I know there is
no other poem in the uni-
verse just like you
and every two folks
have there own way
of loving, the poet
and the poem know
what they like, like
the kind that takes us
into different and strange
countries until we realize
at midnight, we are alone,
you and I, Constant Stranger,
anonymous mates whose love
can never be consummated.

No one stays long
in the house of the bereaved

The hounds are lonely tonight
but not the priest

I dream I am still
in Tennessee grieving

Drinking moonshine
and branch water
looking for a fight

The undertaker creeps out
of the farmer's daughter's room

His wife beats a spider
with a broom then sweeps

When Death beats his child
nobody listens to her weep

My mother used to beg,
Son, don't write about Death,
We'll cross that ditch soon enough

I have nothing but respect
for the dead, I said

But there is no doubt in my mind
Death is a bad dog, a real *****.