Ad Hoc Fiction

Just a Moment

…he pulls, and this time papa raises a blind and bloody bundle, suckling into cold light, seeking hot skin and beating heart, and papa reveals tears, and fears, and godly thoughts and thank-you’s, and when from behind papa’s pillared legs the infant peeks round, grappling for papa’s clever hand, well… from under papa’s skin bursts a proud shield, bearing ironed-out dents, patched holes, and a new bullet-proof coating, and this life-time’s work shelters junior as he steps forward, reaching for coloured spools, stitch after stitch, he weaves seven sorrows and sins, ecstasies and wonders, until a young man, stands, still and tall, he understands, and spins his own creation, procreation, discovering tender-lust, and the twining and binding of love and lives, for life, a beating, systole-diastole, through the umbilical-thread to mama, till it’s time, and she pushes…