How to Write a Love Poem for a Pregnant Woman
Try Using Humor, Stupid
Somehow, I have been lucky enough to have lived seventy-three years in the U S of A without jumping off a bridge, and I really believe I owe my longevity to humor. Comedy has always saved me, whether it’s playful comedy or biting satire. Humans, by nature, are comic creatures. Just go into one your quiet mindfulness states for one day, and closely observe what people say, how they treat each other, and how often their egos turn them into caricatures. We are, indeed, a species ripe for nasty satire, especially now.
But humor can also be playful and, in poetry, it can act as a mischievous kind of foreplay, as the below prose poem proves.
I wrote it years ago when my wife was pregnant with our youngest son. I wanted to cheer her up, find a way to offset all the uncomfortable indignities her body was inflicting on her, especially sciatic pain. What better way to celebrate her passive/aggressive journey than to envision a massage session so exaggerated that it resembled a Tibetan mystery cult.
I hope this poem makes you smile during these troubled times when one often feels that our country is being run my middle-school bullies on a Red Bull high with parents who have indefinitely left town.
“Massaging the Ass of a Pregnant Woman”
Hail to the leaf, to the bleeding milk of dandelions, to the boulder under which an ant is eating its enemy! Even to computer carcasses piled high in a red pickup, to raccoons kneeling before a nearby dumpster. “Where to begin?” I ask Quamina, my Hindu guide, master in the art of pressing flesh. “Personal hygiene counts one-half of one per cent,” he reminds me, though it’s hard to hear over the wall chatter of our Monet haystacks, over an elastic sobbing in my sock drawer. It seems a pack of extra-large condoms feels left out. No! It’s an unsheathed Swiss Army knife wreaking havoc on a handkerchief. No! Just a backyard door slamming, then a few grunts from the neighbor’s above-ground pool. “From the beginning,” I say, “I refused to leave the womb—the bright lights, the doctors promising I’d be a girl.” But let’s return to the clanking overhead fan, to our extra firm mattress, to the familiar flesh between finger and thumb. “Time to dig in,” Quamina smiles. “Wasn’t it she, after all, who invented the sigh?”
[from While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems Undertaker
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss
guys have locker room humor /
women have obstetrician humor.
I'm a dozen years your elder. Woke from a horrible dream and read your note and poem. Waking helped. Maybe Laocoon too, when grappling with Athena's flying serpents, was striving to master empathy's descending ziggurat of impossible demands, having failed when he hurled his spear, caduceus and scepter, into the wooden torso of the Trojan Horse and hearing a nameless (to him and me: only Homer knows) claustrophobic hoplite moan. Or howl like a woman giving birth. My dream? That'll have to wait. Writing helps. Thank you, Peter. Esch word is the overwhelmed, whelping and excessive soul's slimy silver skeleton key into an onyx but utterly agreeable keyhole's ominous silhouette of a miniscule skull and neck.