Poet’s ode to remorse – wish I did not stab her

AN APOLOGETIC street poet who stabbed a pregnant woman on the subway wants to turn the page.

Derrick Wilson, the author of “Don’t Beat Your Children Or They’ll Turn Out Like Me,” says he wouldn’t have plunged his knife into the woman’s neck had he realized she was expecting.

“If I had known she was pregnant I would have offered her my seat,” Wilson said during an exclusive interview Thursday on Rikers Island, where he is being held on $200,000 bond and faces charges including attempted murder.

Wilson, 50, snapped on an uptown No. 2 train in the Bronx on June 8 — wounding pregnant Shaday Tripp and her pal after Tripp bumped his leg.

“I didn’t want to hurt them,” he said. “I just wanted to scare them.”

But momto-be Shaday Tripp, 24, disputes that. “He almost killed me,” Tripp said from her bed at Lincoln Hospital. “I want this man to die.”

Tripp (photo below) was sitting on her friend’s lap aboard the crowded car when her leg brushed against Wilson, she said.

Wilson (photo above) said he thought the pair were part of a much larger group of young women who had gotten on at the same stop and were being boisterous. He says he felt threatened by the crowd and that when Tripp first bumped into him he asked her to stop and “they started sassing me. ... They wouldn’t stop kicking me,” he claimed.

The published poet, who has a rap sheet with 15 prior arrests, lamented he’s never received as much attention for his writing as for his stabbing rampage. “I wasn’t trying to kill her. I wish her a speedy recovery,” he said. “I’m sorry for her and I’m sorry for me.”

Tripp’s mom, Sheniqua Marcus, picked up one of Wilson’s books after he was arrested and said she wasn’t impressed. “There’s nothing good in that book,” Marcus told The News. “He’s sorry he got caught. Maybe if he hadn’t got caught it would’ve been his next book.”