check your birthrate bruh

Hey,
are you still siring bastards
like a stud in a dead heat
panic race against mortality
to the soap factory finish line,

while those hot frothy mares 
of not necessarily yours keep
stamping and champing, bit 
and kissed, stroked and bucking
for more,
and you
can't close
your wallet anymore 

from all the baby photos.

All your kids call you uncle 
or something. Your growing stable 
of young mothers are just good mates, 
not even exes really, just whys 
and why-nots in succession. Dropping
out
and swinging
back in cyclically,
sometimes. If it was good.
If
it was
so good.
Can't we try again? Yes.
The answer was again yes.

Do you ever get tired

of hand-holding, delivery 
rooms and careful understandings? 
Care and something more, true
for whatever it may be worth.
I've heard 
about you. 
Navigating it all like bulletproof 
clockwork, ending up smelling 
like a rose-oiled thorn
in your own 
side, how
you can't stop. How you 
can't even keep.

How you love it. 

How you love each of them
and all of it, and feel a wistful pang
you can't split
into a dozen of you, do
the traditional job proper but - 
they don't need that or want you
that way, or seem to. It all seems
now - whatever happens later - so,
well, adjusted. In every minute
you think of it caught up in a totally 
headlong, heartflung irresponsible way,
in a thrilling habitual exhilarating caper 
existential in nature,
some defiant urge maybe 
to live and live on
replacing yourself 
to a point of boggling
multiple redundancy 
or something, no shame,
no guilt for the planet
and you can't hold
yourself otherwise?

Is that your story? 

What?

No? Oh! That wasn't you? I heard
- I heard 
- I had a dream I think.
Maybe that was it
and I heard that's what you've
been doing with yourself. No?

No kids?

Okay. Ha sorry! I was just just 
curious about that aspect. Well,
congratulations! So what've you

been doing with yourself?