Aubade

In that moment I wonder
   was Freud right after all,
is the female nothing, nothing
   but the absence of the male?
Am I real or a black void
   of soft, organic warmth,
depersonalized fecundity, animal blood,
   alien slime, not a person,
only provisional consciousness
   that moves towards food and spawns
my animal brood? A black earth field,
   bog soil, ready for seed, but not,
never, no, never autonomous.
   A collection of parts: skin,
soft, moist openings, hair, nails,
   bones, cartilage. Not ever a sum
greater than its parts.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

An aubade is a poem written with the conceit that it's a spoken on the occasion of two lovers parting in the morning. The word sounds a lot like "abed" and that's how I tend to think of it. John Donne's The Sunne Rising is an excellent and famous example of an aubade.