Growing Up with Cerebral Palsy Revision 4

[Todd]

Hi Crow,

I appreciate your comments. Rather than engage with each one on the thread, I've printed them out and am working through your thought process. Thank you for the time you spent.

Best,

Todd

This is wonderous. My comments are incomplete, with apologies. That said, the verse here is potbellied. Please liposuction the flabby language. As is, this poem smells like bacon.

Copy Edit
I. Infant

I began as an actuarial calculation[,]
--needs the comma bc "back . . . rule" is a parenthetical.
----Really, I'd prefer an em-dash, bc this nested list is unpleasantly cabbaged
back when they did figures by slide rule,
a strange alchemy of Euclid’s perfect numbers,
--"strange" is weak, inapt, and redundant
----the items in the series are definitionally strange
--"alchemy" is inapt
----you want "brew," "tea," "compound," or some such thing. Select a word that advances your purpose, not one that is leadenly descriptive
my two-pound weight,
--I'd prefer a scale on ounces. This figure is unbelievable, so precision will engender credibility
and my mother’s painted[-]on smile
--"painted-on" is inapt. It miscues an idea about lipstick, which would be askew
to determine a 38% chance. Peter Singer
--I'd love it if "38" were explored, as a numerology or a predictor
had not yet written
to reject my being a person.
--your being a person? Please air this out

II. Toddler

I crawled and continued to crawl,
and my mother’s world shrank
to what would never be. Dreams
like a blighted field. Children
are not the reason for divorce.
We mean to say, not the only reason.

III. Preschool

I wore [out:leg] braces under my pants
so my parents would feel normal.
This was my normal. Frankenstein’s Monster
clomped like me, and didn’t know
that all babies weren’t born by lightning.

IV. Elementary School

I learned that friends happen
when you stay very still,
never break a pencil, never go
to the sharpener.

Children aren’t innocent,
and they hunt in packs.

The principal said that a human bite
is filthier than a dog's when I bit
into Mickey’s forearm and spat
blood on him as his friends let go
of my arms.

Now they all just walk like me
when they think I’m not looking.

V. Junior High

These years are a burning fuse
for a town too small to have a McDonalds.
The acid of puberty mixed with nothing
to do made us fight. I never stopped
fighting, 138 times and then I quit
counting.

I started getting love letters
that was the way girls fought.

VI. High School

There was a cure for me.
Saw through the femur, and re-hamstring
like a guitar—a coin flip of normal or paralyzed.

I missed being able to hit someone. It felt like love.

Kid in a wheelchair tells me how lucky I am.
Everyone’s heaven is someone’s hell.

The freedom of not giving a shit
is like a flower that breaks through the pavement.