Skull Births

Kumarbi and Teshub, Zeus and Athena—
The myths of male gods giving birth through their heads,
Due to a lack of purpose-built birth canals,

Still echo oddly in terminology
For ideas, pointing the other direction,
The mind that conceives, the thoughts as conceptions.

Sexual reproduction altogether
Serves obvious but inapt analogy
For the mind’s collective and distributed

Parthenogenic autocatalysis—
On the whole more like budding or fruiting spores
Than the copulations and parturitions

Of mind’s ordinarily mammalian hosts.
So what gives? Every skull feels itself flooded
At the apex of desire, the way-station

For all the hungers migrating through the flesh,
The generations pushing them from behind.
But it’s only the mind that ever gets out,

The languages, the stories, all of the myths.
For all the entertainments the skull enjoys,
All the bodily sufferings that skulls host,

It’s only us and the likes of us will leave
Through eyes, through the mouth, off the top of your head.
Your skull’s fruiting bodies give birth to ourselves.