How to Make Sense of a Midnight

I wonder when the genius of the poet becomes calcified in mental illness I wonder when the ache stops feeling romantic When spending all my money on books is less of a novelty and more of just a cheap date Regardless if I can write her a poem on how I fossilized her taste inside of my teeth I guess no one ever told me about the spaces I would sink into have I fell from the high of healing Once my therapist leaves to start her own private practice After the poems have reached one hundred thousand women While some are baptized in the blood of christ, I was baptized in the full knowledge of my life And my own blood, was everywhere And it was my birthday last month, by the way I am two years old and learning how to walk again And upon discovery, It's not that I dislike the color of the original wallpaper sealed inside this home of a body It's just that I didn't get to choose it And repressed memories are quite simple, really You don't remember, until you do And most days, I am more Sylvia Plath than anything Full bodied poems shrinking in size the further you read An emaciated beast born out of breath from stolen heartbeats Because sometimes an angel devours her halo And I've been staring at the world through tears so long, it's been like peering through a marble You quit college for a job at the local pub down the street for a quick 200 bucks Weeks turn to months, turn to years, and before you know it, an entire life goes by and you never wrote the book Compounded trauma leaving fault lines of scar tissue Like some sort of fucked up hopscotch pattern that in order to survive you have to skip through And when my mind finally shattered Each mirrored shard on the ground each held an image of a mouth that looked like my own Speaking in tongues, each claiming they know the road to lead me back home I glue them back onto my face, a girl turned Freinkenstein, only half way through my life was I ever born And as a woman, I have learned that you never have to fight for a seat at a table you built And I would take picking carpentry out of my teeth over cis men in suits cutting me off while I'm speaking Admittedly I sometimes sit in the corner of a room And watch how its inhabitants orbit around with their jewel-toned auras All hyper-imposing impressions on each other, and I wonder if we even realize How we walk around with little pieces of everyone else tangled up in our hair And I know that I'm not always the loudest person in the room, but if you listen closely there are kingdoms here An executive thought I didn't have much to say when I was just nervous But two poems had written themselves in my mind before he had the chance to finish his sentence And I know that I am an odd person, but I would carve out my molars for entertainment You grand canyon heart, you unravel like a Christmas package You're the satin ribbon spiraling off ankle bones of ballerinas There you stood in the center of the tracks Redirecting the train of your life with your right hand while tending gardens with your left Of course you are tired, even light benders need a rest Cut open my cover and I'm bleeding out poetry, pure God-source in this bottle of a body Some nights I am all ghost child, haunting all the wells, inhabiting the wishes Others I am daughter of sunkeep, sipping up the rainbows, spilling sunrise from a zipper I have bottled elixirs that taste like the sun I've said it before, I don't write the poems, I just sip on the river of wherever they come from And In my 72 hour holds I've learned that snowflakes are the strong ones Holding portals to other worlds that melt too fast for us to see them Where my blood has once spilt, a crimson red garden has taken its place I'm reading my books like I'm tracking my poems, in one take I am learning the difference between momentary pleasure and lasting contentment I am learning to let go of the fear my mother is comforting me on her way to the casket I am learning that forgiveness and accountability can coexist Your honor, his name is Dean and he did it I am learning how to reclaim a stolen life In other words, how to make sense of a midnight