birth (aboubagoo)

Teen And Up Audiences | No Archive Warnings Apply | No Fandom

Gen | for Jennycakes27 | 322 words | 2025-05-07 | Personal Poetry

Individuality, Echolalia, Radical Love, Pokémon References

To see the world through Jenny Slate's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts (don't be immature). Heartbreak, confusion, and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time. In her dazzling, impossible-to-categorize debut, Slate channels the pain and beauty of life in writing so fresh, so new, and so burstingly alive that we catch her vision like a fever and bring it back out into the bright day with us, and everything has changed.

---- dust jacket blurb for Jenny Slate's Little Weirds, pub. Little/Brown/Co.

birth is necessary and sufficient; a starting point for all ingenuity to blossom
birth means appearance and entrance onto the stage of life

(it's not only for babies, and we all certainly need it
this framing device we can gladly and vicariously use)

and we may play bit parts, or we may recast
we may chew scenery, or we may use it to hide

we may be born into partnerships
each rotating about the next like planetoids
and we pull each other, naturally, as we'd wont to be pulled

where we are, where we're going, and what we need when we get there
each passport and boardpass issued again and again and again

we can be born at any time -- at any time we may enter!!
enter, and be received, and start living -- today!!!!

it's a glorious, magnanimous, not-at-all-fishy sales pitch
the promise that life is really out there for the grasping
for the gripping, with any appendage you can muster to hold

and that any question might change us all
whenever we find our ears open to seek

what wild delights of the waking world
the myriad inflections of a desperate donne-grâce

imagine what millions others have done for you
only the faintest impression that might echo back again
and how you'd leap, dance, sing at the thought

you can be born for it. we are all born for it.
we are all born to leap, dance, sing

those irrelevant circumstances of all of our births
gifting fuel to determination of who and what we are

iterative esoterica floating headless about our minds
taken in with a breath - first breath, coughing strength

and in every moment we are new, new
ever molding to the tomorrow that comes and comes
so we all can last to the future

it's been said before, but we'll say it again
knowing that we only live once, after all

- but we can be (re)born forever