Childrens’ Songs

Whose children are these…

These timorous anticipants of pain,

Swaddled young in circumjacent rolls of fat

Waddling sullen through our lives?

What have we done to them

That they must be this huge this young?

Does their father sex them?

Must they flee their own lithe selves into a lipid surrogate,

Not then as pleasing to their preternatural lover?

Does their patient mother nurse them on her nightsweat fear of loneliness…

A collostrum of terrors, not as yet digestible?

Why do they age in weight, but not in stature or in aspect?

How old are they?

The calf-like eyes that glisten wet through rolling moors of tender fat are all opaque.

The pouting mouth that through a straw will nurse a gassy swill of neon-colored soda will not admit to pain.

To eat and eat again the plethora of packaged snacks and food from malls

Provides a barbitol relief from pain, emotional dysphagia,

malnutrition of the heart;

Sustains for now a dull, hypnotic will live to live and eat again.

Are these our children? If so, then who are we?

— Bill Schubart, Summer 1991