Poem/"Prolapsed"/"Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk

Here is one of the first poems I ever had published. I wrote it in college and it was printed in Emerson College's Gauge Magazine. It's based on Chuck Palahniuk's short story "Guts," which is famous for making audience members vomit and run out of auditoriums when he reads it aloud.

Prolapsed: 

To fall or slip out of place; the falling down or slipping out of place of an organ or part.

To begin with, I am forty-six chromosomes.
At week six my insides develop
covered by layers –
skin, muscle, soft bones.
Now this
thirteen years grown
an adult, almost, and inside out.
Reverse birth like reverse evolution:
man turning back into ape,
or me turning back into one
enthusiastic sperm.

(At a dirty friends suggestion I sat at the bottom of my swimming pool feeling the sucking of the circulation pump as I came).

Viscera,
like cheap yellow birthdaycake frosting
sucked out, floating up
in one long soft thread.
My insides, once held down,
now rapidly ascending,
detached and independent,
stretching for their first choke of air,
reaching the top where the sun
jumps off the water’s surface
and flickers with each small fold.

Mom says: get out of the pool.
Get out, come to dinner.
Tell me to get out,
to get out and come to dinner.Wrap me in a towel warm from the dryer
my body dripping DNA
at the dining table
where we’ll eat pot roast and I’ll complain
about the broccoli.

I chew through myself.
My braced teeth sink in, spring up
trying to tear into me,
chlorinated water bloats inside my empty layers.
That hard sucking noise
and my heartbeat.