Twins. A genetic duet.
Your tiny fingers and nebula hearts
crumble like the cakes I should have baked
for your birthdays.
Here in this room of sterile breaths and floral decline
I count the chromosomes
that
in a million trillion seconds time will be floating out in space;
a tandem of babies in perfect altitude.
Today was another life away,
a miracle of iteration, a perfect bisection of duplication.
The nurses, their Doris Day fluttering, hygienic hands,
mourn you
in the pale of their lipstick
and frantic blinking.
I see you bilateral and fragmented
holding the thumping hemispheres of my heart.
Dusting the walls with the powder of your skin
You
circumnavigate the hot pink amniotic
and swim coupled across the equator.
When I leave tomorrow
no-one will see the imprinted, duplex, tattoo, ID
of you.
There will be no candles or balloons
to fly you to the moon (in any other words),
your simultaneous attendance not marked
on any register of mine.
Your passport to my heart, sundered
just in time for us
to walk out holding hands -
smiling
not mentioning you, not writing the headlines that will
send faxes to my mind
in every second’s time.
Co-incidental neutrality -
never dominant nor recessive.
Yet happy birthday my sweet reproductive reduplicates.
Your cells are my walls
and your soft toe-prints
stamp the iris of my eyes
I can not,
and may not, begin to disguise
the smash of your tiny coexistence;
wrapped up in plastic and umbilical ribbon
and sent second class and half-finished
down the stars.
