The moody boy in me died but the broody boy lives on
cos he thinkin bout the way you think the moody boy be gone
And he gone for sure but broody boy he think you don’t want him
so he brooding on the moodiness he think you got him in
Broody wants you to feel loved like maybe moody couldn’t do
and he wants you to know the love he got for you is love that’s true
He wants you to know that at very least if you feel so all alone
then brood on him a moment cos he got you listed as his home
Yeah broody boy alive and well and he think you mighty fine
like a gal that’s worth excavating for to build cellars for her wine
If there ain’t nothing else left in this world for you to take and hold dear
Just know this broody boy loves you so and he’ll whisper in your ear:
“We burn long and bright and through the night to the other side of the day
The eternal Yule log we light to fight and keep them bad spirits at bay
And it’s you and me, we the earth and sea, we the flames and wood below
We here to stay and ain’t going away cos it’s those bad spirits have to go”
Maybe he’s broody and maybe still moody but put a cap on his *** and see
That the boy inside loves that girl in you and he’ll love eternally

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the *******
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask.  The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that.  Traveling
**** as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me.  He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents.  At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.  I grow backward.  I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and ******* her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.