half of yourself had been waiting in your mother’s ovary since some time before her birth. half of you was manufactured in one of your father’s testes some days before your conception. maybe. it is possible that half of you came from a thawed-out sperm donation.

your tadpole half plowed into your egg half. dna from the tadpole’s head did a jackson pollock number on the egg’s inside wall. the wall thickened and became like unto gandalf to the other sperm cells, saying in effect “you shall not pass.”

you developed and became viable.

you passed through a birth canal or an incision and if you did not cry a childbirth attendee gave you something to cry about.

what you are doing here and now is continuing the journey you began, a journey of survival and the satisfaction of your curiosity, now reading the expositive words of a stranger or a friend or both or neither, and this very instant you have satisfied your curiosity by finding out how this poem en