O O O O 

            (it's not what you're thinking)
             


            That’s some Shakespearean rag

            Always elegant

            So  pleasingly self-evident

             

            And it ain’t mine. 


            To tell you the truth


            I just can’t find those kinds of words

            Can’t make sentences flow that way 

            And I don’t put my thoughts together well enough
             
             
            (so I have been told often enough)
             


            I let my heart get ahead of my thinking, my actions,
             
             I guess you’d have to say 

            I feel the waters break

            A warm gush gathering around my heels and spilling over


            step-ins plastered to my thighs

            I slosh passed reception and onto the elevator

            Two nurses-dressed-as-nuns 

            and a dead -beat father-of-a-husband
             
            under my wing

             

            But that was  late December,
             
            Maybe forty very odd years ago,

             

            Those times 
             
            I think I still knew a little somethin'
             
            'bout
             
            birthin'
             
             and all my children