A Poem: The Baby Thief

The Baby Thief
by james bezerra

What if you had
just had
a baby
and while you were still in the hospital,
maybe in a deep
slumber, say,
Bono stole your baby?

Like a phantom of
the night gone black,
like a fang-ed bat man,
like a banshee of the moors or a
sun-glasses-wearing incubus,
he is stealing your baby!

Crouched there on the
ledge of
the open window,
crimson velvet hospital curtains billowing
around him,
your
fresh pink baby
clutched in his United Nations-Goodwill-Ambassador’s
talons.

You swallow your cries,
so as not to
spook him. They burn like Irish whiskey.
“Bono” you coo, “please give back my baby.”
“I can’t live” he growls, “with, or without you.”

Your baby squirms.
You squeak.
Bono looks both annoyed
and hungry.

You realize his
cloak
is made of skins. Soft and fleshy skins all
stitched together from the
tanned and oiled
hides of babes.

“Come here Bono, come here. Bring the baby back here.”

He only snarls, lips quivering and
wet,
sharp incisors catching
dull hospital light. He says through the gravel of his growl,
“I still haven’t found,
what I’m looking for.”

Then there is a
rustle and
from
beneath his cloak of skins,
unfurl mighty
wings.
Wings
that sprout terribly from the
blades of his shoulders. Wings the
color of thin meat,
laced with plump pumping webs of
purple veins,
light glows through the living membranes.

He flaps them wide and big as the room and big like god and
he faces
out the window.

“Bono, no!”

From the ledge he leaps,
your baby within his arms,
pressed against his
scaly and furry black chest,
close to the thick, knotted muscle of his heart.
and as his wings catch
the air,
you hear
him shriek, “Whose gonna ride
your wild horses?”



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