oh you of little faith

another new year another blue year another sluice of tears -
what are internal tears? my daughter asks me and I picture
shameful salty drops welling up on the dark insides of eyeballs -
I know that feeling well enough but no she has got
the phonetics wrong~ she has been reading about internal
ripping of flesh in a little girls' magazine and now I wish
her childish misreading had been right
internal teardrops internal smearslops internal lightglobes probes infernal
one-man-scans internal refuses bruises internal sutures ruptures eternal
collapses prolapses synapses moral-lapses - why
does everything female have to be so bloody

internal?
just the other day I saw the gynie-in-a-bottle - F/Croke F/Frog
frigging get your effing fingers out of me - My word you are a
sensitive lady, he said, shoving a thing wrapped in clingfilm up my
Cosmic Flower of Delight ~ that thing has been up to its tricks
inside just about every twat in this town every touche in this here
territory every you-know-what in the whole run-amoking cuntry
reminiscent of james herriot with a milelong rubber glove on
his right arm and a leather skullcap on his head that gynie is
more veterinary than voluble~ subscribing to the giddup
clickclick-whoaa! variety of bedside repartee -

if my gynie was a genie I would ask him please could I perhaps
have a holiday - I would offer to rub his lamp three times if
only I could have a day wherein I could visit doctors
whose hands and crude tools of trade stayed on the outside of me -
a holiday wherein I no longer had to be the tattooed bouncer
at my own pub door - wherein I didn't owe anyone an unguided
tour of my insides, for one whole day

sometimes I think if jesus had been born a woman the
resurrection wouldn't have worked - as soon as she appeared
to thomas she would have been carted off to some place like luna park
and thomas would have been a spruiker not an apostle - and all day
he would have called out to the crowds - come and push your fingers in
the wounds of the messiah the little old nailholes in this much messier
messenger - and the people would have crowded round to have a prod,
and at least once a week, thomas would have had a loving poke too,
just to make sure the holes were still there

© Philomena van Rijswijk